Director: Steven Lawson
Writers: Phillip Barron and Ben Shillito
Producer: Jonathon Sothcott
Cast: Danny Dyer, Craig Fairbrass, Steven Berkoff
Country: UK
Year of release: 2010
Reviewed from: UK DVD (Metrodome)
Website: There used to be one at www.justfortherecord-movie.com but it has completely disappeared and we shall discover why...

In recent years I have watched and reviewed two recursive mockumentaries; that is, spoof documentary films about the making of fictitious narrative films. There was Mark Withers’ Hardcore: A Poke into the Adult Film Orifice (subsequently retitled Bare Naked Talent) and Keith Wright’s Take Me to Your Leader. Checking the site, I see that I gave each of them an MJS rating of A-.

I haven’t decided on a rating for Just for the Record yet, but it’s unlikely to be A-, I know that.

This is another recursive mockumentary about the making of a micro-budget indie feature film but the big difference from Withers’ and Wright’s movies is that both of those actually were micro-budget indie feature films. They cost tuppence ha’penny to make, they were the debut feature from their respective directors, and between them the biggest star that either could rustle up was a small role in Hardcore for Marysia Kay. To the best of my knowledge, neither film has yet received any sort of distribution.

Just for the Record, on the other hand, is on sale for six quid in my local supermarket. It was produced by Jonathan Sothcott’s movie factory Black and Blue Films, features a cast list packed with recognisable names and faces, clearly cost way more than Hardcore and Take Me to Your Leader put together and has been released in the UK by Metrodome who gave it a token theatrical release and have now very thoughtfully stuck several unskippable trailers for other releases on the DVD that have to be sat through first.

There is another fundamental difference between this recursive mockumentary and the other two. In my review of Hardcore I observed that it was rarely laugh-out-loud funny and when critiquing Take Me to Your Leader I made the same observation. Both films derive their comedy from gentle, well-observed character humour. Just for the Record is also rarely laugh-out-loud funny but that’s because it attempts to derive its humour mostly from weak, unfunny jokes.

It is also poorly conceived, badly written, bizarrely directed. alarmingly miscast, indifferently structured and full of thoroughly unsympathetic characters who you will quickly grow to hate.

And there, there, is the nub of all its faults. For example director Harlan Noble, as played by Roland Manookian (The Football Factory, Rise of the Footsoldier, Dead Cert), is a complete tit. A vain, pretentious, self-important, self-opinionated, thoroughly unlikeable arsehole. Many of the other characters are also far from sympathetic, so where is the audience investment? In both Hardcore and Take Me to Your Leader, we really wanted the film-makers to overcome their problems. They were underdogs, battling against a lack of money, lack of time, lack of resources and lack of talent, but they displayed an indomitable spirit, a determination to not let little things - like not knowing how to make a film and being surrounded by people who didn’t know how to make a film either - hold them back. We were rooting for them.

But when your central character is a complete tosser, why should we be bothered about his problems?

Noble is a whiny, weaselly little prat with pretentious spectacles, a prematurely receding hairline and a goatee so minimalist that you literally can’t see it when he turns sideways. One of the other characters describes it as “a Brazilian on his chin.” He has a Rocky Horror poster on his wall, a literal shrine to Chuck Norris and a fawning assistant, Danny Allgen, played by Scouser Ciaran Griffiths (Shameless, The Bill, Dead Cert), with possibly the worst Brummie accent I have ever heard. Has he ever even met anyone from Birmingham?

Noble is an arrogant prick who believes that he is making an ‘experience’. He hands out ashtrays instead of business cards (which could have been funny if handled right, but isn’t) and wears personalised underpants (which was never going to be funny). Allgen takes on the position of First AD, thereby making him another self-important little tosser, and when not on set he is completely gay for Noble (which again, could have been funny but isn’t). I’m going to need a shorthand for that, aren’t I? I’ll use ‘ashtray’, okay? From now on, anything which I describe as ‘ashtray’ or ‘an ashtray’ is something which, in a good script and with a bit of directorial care and a half-decent actor, could actually have been funny. But here, for whatever reason, it ain’t.

So that’s the director; what about the writer? Ian Virgo (Rise of the Footsoldier, Dead Cert) plays Flynn Beatty as the broadest stereotype of a nerdy, snobbish fool. He lives with his mother (Alice Barry: Shameless), has badly cut, greasy hair, wears a twee cardigan and sports a small moustache just this side of Adolf Hitler. Beatty is a talentless, jumped-up little twit and no more sympathetic than the director or the 1st AD.

And then there’s Danny Dyer (The Football Factory, Severance, Doghouse, Jack Said, Dead Cert) as producer Derek La Farge, a character who is specifically singled out in the credits as being “inspired by Jonathan Sothcott” - who produced Just for the Record but is more at home with horrors such as Dead Cert or Wishbaby. You know a film’s in trouble when one of the most sympathetic characters is a slimeball played by Danny Dyer.

Now, I’ll say this for Dyer. I know a lot of people can’t stand him. And even he must be aware that he is associated in the public mind with a certain sort of character in a certain sort of film. Ask anyone to do an impression of Danny Dyer and they will respond “Fack off you slaaaag!” (unless you ask Mark Kermode who will say “Danny Dyah!” in a high pitched voice: no love lost between those two). There is certainly a perception that Dyer only plays gangster geezers and indeed can only play gangster geezers.

Now, I don’t know Danny Dyer and have never met him, although we have mutual friends such as Jonathan Sothcott and Jake West. He is widely painted in the media as, let’s face it, a knob, which he may or may not be. I neither know nor care, I’m just bothered at the moment about whether he can act. (I did meet Mark Kermode once, many years ago and he did seem to be a knob.)

The fact is that Danny Dyer is actually a good actor, and one with range - when given the opportunity. He certainly has a flare for comedy as we saw in Doghouse (albeit he was effectively parodying his own gangster geezer stereotype). In Just for the Record, he plays La Farge as a louche, nouveau riche, moustachioed pastiche (couldn’t resist writing that) with slicked back hair, a smart suit and tie and a pencil moustache. He is an item with talentless, self-important, American starlet Sarah Friedrichs (Victoria Silvstedt) and the two are interviewed indulging in a series of outlandish pampering treatments.

Dyer’s characterisation of La Farge is comedic but believable - in stark contrast to the unsubtle, unfunny wannabe-wackiness of Manookian, Griffiths and Virgo. It’s like he’s in a sitcom and they’re all in a sketch show. And not a good sketch show either; one of those sketch shows on BBC3 that makes your brain hurt as you try to work out how and why it was ever commissioned.

Some of the actors in Just for the Record play their parts like planks of wood, reciting their lines so mechanically that you’re left wondering if these are actually non-English-speaking actors who have learned the script phonetically. But we all know that the secret of a good mockumentary is improvisation. It worked for This is Spinal Tap, it worked for Take Me to Your Leader, it worked for all points inbetween. The best way to get a completely naturalistic performance out of your actors in a film like this is to let them workshop their characters, give them the gist of what they should say and point the camera at them.

As a scriptwriter myself I shouldn’t really be in favour of improv on screen but I’m prepared to make an exception for the mockumentary genre because the evidence is there that, in this type of film, the technique generates great results. So, while it doesn’t look like Dyer is improvising, he does at least seem to be extemporising which is halfway there and makes his character much more fun to spend time with - certainly less tortuous to watch - than some of the others.

Silvstedt, who was Playboy’s Miss December 1996, has less to do; she’s really just there to suggest, in an ashtray way, that her entirely unreasonable demands are perfectly reasonable for a star of her calibre. Triana Terry (Stalker) plays Lucy Smithfield, a posh young actress interviewed during a workout in her gym. Although Terry has more screentime than Silvstedt (by my estimation) she has just as little to work with. The character may not be as shallow but the characterisation certainly is. There is also Rita Ramnani (Erin from the Jack Says trilogy, also in The Last Seven and The Hunt for Gollum), playing a Russian actress named Olga, who has even less to do apart from put on a dodgy accent (although not as dodgy as Ciaran Griffiths’.) And Calum McNab (The Football Factory, Rise of the Footsoldier - do you see a pattern developing here?) plays Mark Nowlan, a young actor who gets drunk and whose token characterisation is that he used to be on Grange Hill, which doesn’t even qualify as an ashtray.

Billy Murray (The Bill, EastEnders, Rise of the Footsoldier, Doghouse, Dead Cert, Stalker) has more to work with as Wilson Barnes, a constantly imbibing veteran actor with a nice car for getting between watering holes and what should be a stack of anecdotes but eventually amounts to little more than an ashtray about Richard Burton. It’s a meatier part that gives the (real) actor a lot more to work with than, say McNab’s thankless role.

Interestingly, early posters list Dirk Benedict among the cast and I’ve seen one that includes David Soul in the credit block. Since Murray’s name is absent from that credit block, and since it would make sense for the part of an old-school actor with a wealth of experience to be played by an old school actor with a wealth of experience, we can reasonably deduce that Benedict, and then Soul, were lined up to play Wilson Barnes. (In fact the part was originally intended for Murray who was forced to drop out because of conflicting work. Benedict and Soul were both lined up but unavailable and in the end a schedule was arranged that allowed Murray to take the role after all.)

The David Soul poster puts his name above the title, along with Dyer, Silvstedt, Manookian, Rik Mayall and Geoff Bell, but has photos of Dyer, Silvstedt, Manookian, Mayall, Bell and Sean Pertwee, who I know was brought into the film at the last minute which might suggest perhaps Soul was going to play his part. Or maybe whoever pasted the poster together wasn’t paying attention. (This poster appeared in June 2009, around the time that the film wrapped principal photography, along with the first trailer which has since disappeared from YouTube and everywhere else.)

Pertwee (Talos the Mummy, Dog Soldiers, When Evil Calls, Doomsday, Mutant Chronicles, Devil’s Playground but, incredibly, neither The Football Factory nor Rise of the Footsoldier, although he was in Goal! and Goal! 2) plays Harlan Noble’s martial arts instructor, Sensei Kreese, which presumably is supposed to tie in somehow with Noble’s barely glimpsed and thus largely irrelevant Chuck Norris obsession. Geoff Bell (Stardust, Solomon Kane, The Reeds) is Nicholas Johnson, another producer who owns a chain of strip clubs, where his interviews take place. Greasily debonair, he’s an insincere creep and it is his idea to get young Nowlan drunk, although why he does this is never explained. There is a third producer called Jim (Frank Harper: Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, The Football Factory, Rise of the Footsoldier, Kung Fu Flid) but he barely features although there is a single scene near the end of the film which has all three producers in one shot - one of the very few times that characters appear on screen together.

Colin Salmon (Judi Dench’s 2IC in three Pierce Brosnan Bonds, also in Stalker and Devil’s Playground) appears briefly near the end as Maynard Stark, the UK’s “blackest, gayest film editor” which is presumably supposed to be outrageous or shocking or something but is just inane and unfunny. Craig Fairbrass (Beyond Bedlam, Proteus, Darklands, Rise of the Footsoldier, Dead Cert, Devil’s Playground) is the ‘executive producer’ - in the sense that it’s his dodgy money funding the production - a hard-as-nails London gangster called Malcolm ‘Mental Fists’ Wickes. No cheeky cockney, post-Guy Richie jack-the-lad here; Fairbrass plays Wickes completely straight as a heavily tattooed thug with absolutely no qualms about extreme violence and a small gang of sycophantic minders.

Steven Berkoff - Steven freaking Berkoff! - plays Mike Rosferry, the cinematographer. Berkoff’s genre credentials extend as far back as Hammer’s Slave Girls and a 1965 episode of The Avengers. In fact, even before that, he allegedly had uncredited bit parts in The Flesh and the Fiends and Konga. He was also in A Clockwork Orange, four episodes of UFO, Outland, Octopussy, Underworld, episodes of Space Precinct and DS9, the Children of Dune mini-series, The Cottage and Dead Cert.

Now Rosferry is quite interesting. You know Berkoff: he’s a bald-headed, scary-looking guy (and one of our finest serious actor-directors - remember his one-man, effects-free production of Kafka’s Metamorphosis? - what the hell is he doing in something like this?). But Rosferry is played as a doddery old fart, sat in a chair in an old people’s home. An extra collapses behind him mid-interview and is wheeled away on a stretcher, which is quite possibly the closest thing to a funny joke in the whole film. Berkoff adopts the same voice (and possibly the same woolly hat) that Bernard Cribbins used as Wilf in Doctor Who, only with a bit more swearing. The idea is that Rosferry is a fossil, an old guy who doesn’t understand modern film-making techniques and equipment, although this really only involves him having a rant about how Hitchcock didn’t need to use digital.

The trouble is, during the few brief scenes of actual film-making, Berkoff looks like himself: no woolly hat, no doddery old-bloke mannerisms, no trouble standing up and moving around. Nor does he seem at all confused by the camera he’s standing next to. So that it takes a while to realise that these two are the same person.

What a bunch of deeply unsympathetic characters we’ve got here. Some are horrible, some are stupid, some are horrible and stupid, some are simply bland. Which raises the question: what makes a sympathetic film character? Well, in a thriller, horror film or action movie, a sympathetic character is one who you want to, if not win, at least survive until the end of the film. That’s one of the reasons why I hated Reservoir Dogs - I didn’t care if any of them lived or died because they were all awful human beings - but I enjoyed Pulp Fiction, a film which made me care about what might happen to Bruce Willis.

In a comedy, drama, romance or any other sort of movie where, to be honest, pretty much everyone will still be alive at the end of the film (unless they are very, very old or have an incurable disease or like to cross streets without looking both ways) I believe that a sympathetic character is one that you would like to go for a drink with. In this film, that’s basically Wilson Barnes, who seems like the sort of bloke who doesn’t give a toss about what people think, and Rosie Frond, a flirty, flighty Welsh hairdresser ably played by Pumpkinhead 3’s Lisa McAllister (also in - guess what? - Dead Cert and Devil’s Playground, plus the mooted Asphyx remake).

Only McAllister and Murray give what could be considered a ‘a really good comic turn’ in this film. Dyer and Bell also at least seem to be trying. But most of the rest of the cast are either going through the motions or might as well be going through the motions for all the comedic skills they so manifestly fail to display.

Finally there is Rik Mayall as Andy Wiseman, the documentary maker who is supposedly conducting all the interviews. He does actually appear with other actors in a few shots but in many of the interview segments poor sound mixing makes it very, very obvious that his voice has been recorded elsewhere.

And mention of the phrase ‘interview segments’ brings up the problem of the film’s structure because that’s almost all we have: a constant series of cuts between interviews. Some characters are given a single location, some have multiple locations. Flynn Beatty does one of his interviews bouncing on a trampoline for no reason at all that I can fathom. But we see hardly any actual scenes of the film being made and absolutely no footage at all from the fake film. So all these people are talking about creating something that we never ever see and we only get the briefest of glimpses at the actual creation.

Now, it is possible to make a film of nothing but talking heads. Simon Rumley managed that over ten years ago with his extraordinary Strong Language. But it’s a dangerous conceit and you really, really have to know what you’re doing. And the odd thing here is that there is a tiny little bit of behind-the-scenes footage. We see Frond coming on to the terrified Nowlan, we see Nowlan throwing up and collapsing after his trip to the strip club. And we see Malcolm ‘Mental Fists’ Wickes visit the set and nut Sean Pertwee’s sensei character.

So what don’t we see? We don’t see anyone at any point making a film. Or attempting to make a film. We don’t see any actors in costume. We don’t really see anything.

Nor, of course, do we see the driving force behind any script: character conflict. Because everyone is interviewed separately, there are no relationshps in this film, apart from La Farge/Friedrichs and Nobe/Allgen, who are both ostensibly happy couples and therefore not in obvious conflict. Characters in a script are defined by their relationships with other characters, so without those relationships, pretty much everyone here comes across as a one-note cypher. It’s not the actors’ fault, it’s how this stuff has been written.

The fake film is also called Just for the Record and is described as a romcom set in a second-hand record shop. The fact that the second-hand record shop, as a retail endeavour, is almost extinct suggests that this script may have been sitting on someone’s hard-drive for quite a while. Although to be fair, they do seem to have found a real second-hand record shop to shoot in. Phil Davis (Quadrophenia, Underworld, Robin of Sherwood, Howling V, Alien 3) plays the somewhat out-of-it proprietor and we can add him to the short list of good comic turns in the film. His explanation that he kept moving a poster around the shop because he thought it would look like stop-motion animation when the film was finished could have been one of the best gags, but it ends up as simply another ashtray.

As for the fake characters in the fake film, Lucy Smithfield plays an estate agent, apparently. And that is precisely as much as we are told. Nothing about any of the other characters. Nothing about the plot. Zilch. Zippo. Nada.

So this is a film about people we don’t like trying to create something which we’re not told about. Hmm, that’ll work...

Flynn Beatty’s script apparently involves ‘space monkeys’ in some way because when he is asked to write a script very quickly, it always has space monkeys. That’s not even ashtray. The idea of space monkeys in a romcom just isn’t funny. It’s a jokoid. It has the shape of a joke - admittedly just a surreal non sequitur that’s trying desperately to be wacky, but a joke nonetheless - and yet it is entirely unfunny. In a similar vein, we are told that Harlan Noble’s previous film was about ‘ninja sharks’. Oh, my aching sides. That’s so zany.

But that betrays a complete ignorance of micro-budget film-making, which is what this film is supposed to be about. Low budget film-makers don’t make films about sharks or monkeys because you can’t make a film about sharks or monkeys without prosthetics, animatronics or CGI, all of which cost money. That’s why low-budget film-makers make films about zombies or vampires or ninjas or gangsters. Things that don’t cost money.

Either this is a failed attempt at a romcom or it’s a cheesy B-movie. Make your mind up.

Similarly, it seems that Noble has scribbled over parts of the script to add nude scenes and sexy bits. So he’s a perv. No wait, he’s a martial artist. No wait, he’s a pretentious wannabe auteur. No wait, he’s all of those things, even though none of these broadly painted character traits match or mesh together. Noble’s character, just like the supposed subject matter of the film being made, is just a Frankenstein-ian lash-up of ideas without any sort of credible coherence.

The actual film, the real one, the one I paid six quid for, was directed by a real director, Steven Lawson, who I always have to think of as The Other Steve Lawson as he’s not the one who directed me in Insiders. Although, like The Original Steve Lawson, The Other Steve Lawson is also an occasional actor, with a bunch of assorted roles including one in Jack Said. He even appears briefly in this movie as a taxi driver. The Original Steve Lawson earns his living making corporate videos and has been directing shorts and features since he was a lad. The Other Steve Lawson is a businessman who owns a gold coin-trading business and this is his debut feature. And it shows, to be honest. This is a film about micro-budget film-making directed by a bloke who doesn't really have any experience of micro-budget film-making so, for those of us who do, it's completely unrealistic.

But here’s what I don’t understand. It really seems like nobody told Lawson that he was filming a mockumentary. Because what’s the defining feature of a mockumentary? It has to look like a documentary, right? That’s sort of the whole point.

And it’s a great get-out clause for the lower-budgeted production because documentaries, especially when shot on the fly, don’t have the technical polish of a narrative film. If the lighting’s a bit dodgy or the framing isn’t right or there’s background noise - that all adds to the verisimilitude. Documentaries, especially Making Of documentaries, are often shot handheld, single camera - hence mockumentaries are too. And this, despite the minuscule amount of fake behind-the-scenes footage, is a mockumentary.

So why did Steven Lawson decide to shoot it all - interviews and fake behind-the-scenes stuff - like a conventional narrative film? We expect talking-head interviews to be done in one take, with maybe some cutaways to the interviewer nodding to cover unavoidable edits. That’s how documentaries look. Everyone knows that. We’ve all seen enough. We don’t expect multiple takes of the same interview from different angles to be edited together like a real feature film because that completely destroys what little illusion there may have been that these are real people talking about a real film.

In a mockumentary (if I may get pretentious for a moment), the camera-work is diegetic. You see? Three years of Film Studies at Staffordshire University wasn’t wasted after all.

There is kind of a precedent for this in the 2006 comedy film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (which was moderately amusing but not as funny or well-made as the trailer for the 2006 comedy film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan). Borat was supposed to be a spoof documentary but there were numerous scenes where the only two characters present were Borat himself and his fat producer - so who was holding the camera?

Is it just me? Am I the only one who notices these things? Or do other people notice them but remain unbothered by them? It always amazes me how people are so keen to pick up minute continuity errors or production flubs but really huge, fundamental problems in films - big hits and obscure DTV crap alike - so often get completely ignored. Maybe it’s just me.

So what have we dealt with so far? The unsympathetic characters, the ‘mixed’ acting, the absence of actual fake film clips, the almost complete absence of fake behind-the-scenes footage, the inability of the director to make it look like a real documentary - and of course, the aching void of humourlessness.

What about the plot?

A film like this, about people struggling against the odds, usually involves some sort of triumph, however small; some aspect of redemption, a learning experience, a coming of age, a realisation of pathos that leads to the replacement of a meaningless obsession with a joyful embrace of reality. It’s there in Take Me to Your Leader, it’s there in This is Spinal Tap, it’s even there in some genuine documentaries like the wonderful Anvil: The Story of Anvil. It’s there in narrative films about creative struggles, like Ed Wood or School of Rock.

It’s not here. This is a film where the three-act structure is: pre-production, production, post-production (each introduced with a little semi-animated caption) as the interviewees discuss each stage of the film-making process in turn. But that’s not a three-act structure. That’s not thesis, antithesis, synthesis. That’s not boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. That’s not man climbs tree, man falls out of tree, if he’s alive it’s comedy and if he’s dead it’s drama. Pre-production, production, post-production is just a sequence of three things happening in order.

A hero’s journey? Who the hell is the hero here? Harlan Noble? Derek La Farge? Flynn Beatty? Malcolm ‘Mental Fists’ Wickes? There is no hero, there is no journey. There’s a quest of sorts, but it’s not a quest we care one iota about. We have to care about what happens in a film, even in a supposed comedy. We need at least one character to identify with and we have to want him or her to succeed in some way. It really is that simple.

Towards the end, there is the closest that the film gets to a plot when Wickes appears, wanting to know where his money is. The production wraps with about three quarters of the script filmed, a rough cut is cobbled together by Colin Salmon’s blackest, gayest editor, but it’s unusable so the whole thing stops. We’re not shown anything from this unusable rough cut, we’re not told anything about it, and with the information that the fictitious film was never completed, the real film just ends, about an hour and a quarter in. The last line is a weak, crude gag about sex which is meant to be some sort of shock revelation but is in the trailer anyway.

That’s it, that’s the plot.

Which doesn’t chime at all with the advertising strapline that says: “They made the worst film of all time ... let the trial begin!” Because, clearly, the characters in this film didn’t make the worst film of all time. Because they didn’t finish the film. You can’t judge a film, even a fictitious one, on the basis of an incomplete rough cut. That nobody has seen. In the tiny, tiny amount of information that we are given about the fake film, there is no suggestion about its quality, no clue that it’s ‘the worst film of all time’ (apart from the incongruous-yet-unfunny presence of space monkeys in a romcom). Even in a fictional world, ‘the worst film of all time’ is an epithet that can only be bestowed on, well, a film. And there’s no film here. We’re not shown any of it, we’re not shown anyone making it, we’re given only a handful of vague references to its content - and in the end it doesn’t exist.

This is a film about people we don’t like trying to do something we don’t care about and don’t know about who then stop before they’ve finished anyway. Just for the Record (the fake romcom) is meant to be a textbook example of how not to make a film but in fact Just for the Record (the real mockumentary) is a textbook example of how not to make a film. How’s that for recursive?

And therein lies the supreme irony here and the terrible danger which other films about film-making have generally avoided. This movie is peppered with comments about how useless everything going into this film is: how the script is shite, the director hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing, the actors are wooden, the whole production is shoddy beyond belief, an embarrassment to those who worked on it etcetera etcetera etcetera. If you don’t want to sit through the whole 79 minutes (understandable), most of these comments are collected in the trailer. And pretty much all of them accurately describe the real Just for the Record. The characters are talking about the fake film but what they’re actually describing is the real film.

“I’ve been watching the film they’ve been making - and it’s absolute fucking shit,” observes Fairbrass/Wickes. “It’s got no story, it makes no sense, and it’s the same thing all the time.”

Never has a truer word been spoken. (Actually, in the film it is revealed that what Wickes has watched are the dailies, multiple takes of the same scene, but he is so ignorant of the film-making process that he thinks he’s seeing part of the finished movie. That gets perilously close to being a funny joke but sadly ends up as just another ashtray.) It is always a bad idea to give your characters lines about something awful which can be applied by critics to the movie in question. To stick them into your trailer is suicidal, but perhaps by then the people involved realised that they had a turd on their hands and thought: what the hell?

So who is responsible for this mess, this dog’s dinner of a film? And let’s be fair, it’s not the worst film of all time - although bizarrely Rik Mayall was in that picture too...

Although some of the acting is poor (some of which may be the actors, some of which may actually be good actors struggling with one-dimensional characters) and although the director’s decision to shoot a documentary in a non-documentary style is bizarre, the root cause of all the problems is, of course, the script. All the fundamental flaws - the lack of likeable characters, the lack of interaction and character relationships, the lack of any stuff about the actual film, the lack of a narrative structure, the lack of an ending - they can all be blamed wholly or in part on the script.

Three people take credit on-screen for this: screenplay by Phillip Barron and Ben Shillito, with additional material by Steve Lawson (although only Barron and Shillito are named in the credit block on the DVD sleeve). One might think that the film’s failure is a result of three writers trying to pull it in different directions, maybe. But all the posters and trailers give a solo writing credit to Phillip Barron so I believe that he is the principal author. And this belief is backed up by Barron’s blog on which he said:

“Obviously, I can’t take any credit for anything you liked in the film - that privilege is reserved for either director, Steve Lawson, or the specific performers; but on the off-chance the bit you liked was in some way connected to the script I wrote - I’ll bask in that little glow.

“That’s not to say the happenings on screen bear little or no resemblance to the script - far from it. In fact, I’d say 90 odd percent of what’s there comes from my script - but obviously anything you write is made or killed by the performances, the editing, the direction … a whole myriad of stuff.”

An acknowledgement of Lawson there but, interestingly, nowhere on his numerous blog posts does he mention Shillito’s involvement. Still: “90 odd percent of what’s there comes from my script.”

And it was when I found Phillip Barron’s blog, while googling for background information on Just for the Record, that I realised who he was and where I have encountered him online before. Do you recall, several thousand words ago near the beginning of this epic review, when I alluded to “one of those sketch shows on BBC3 that makes your brain hurt as you try to work out how and why it was ever commissioned”? Well, Phillip Barron writes for those BBC3 sketch shows.

Barron was one of the writers on a gut-wrenchingly shoddy and unfunny series called The Wrong Door and popped up on a TV discussion board to defend himself and the show after I started a thread on it. He also wrote for a thing called Shoot the Writers which wasn’t even as good as a bad BBC3 show; it was tucked away on ITV late night in 2005 and was probably the worst comedy show I’ve ever seen in my life. It was not only a non-stop barrage of unfunny, unoriginal sketches written by amateur wannabe writers, it was also shot for about five pounds, apparently using drama students as the cast and media production students as the crew. It just beggared belief. A blank screen would have been more entertaining.

Now, let me pause here to be fair to Phillip Barron (who will no doubt be reading this at some point and probably e-mail me or post in my guestbook). He is making a living as (to use the title of his blog) a jobbing scriptwriter. That’s a goal that many people strive for and he has achieved it. Obviously, like any pro scriptwriter, much of his work is on projects which never see the light of day. No shame in that, it’s how the film and TV industries work. Film production is a zero sum equation: anything that gets made prevents something else getting made. So it is all the unmade stuff that keep writers off the dole queue. Although frankly Barron spends so much time writing his blog that you do wonder when he has time to write any scripts.

Although most of his work is ‘comedy’ he has a few other genre credits: script editor on British vampire feature Night Junkies, co-writer of obscure Troma pick-up The Evolved and a ‘story’ credit for the Sothcott-produced Stalker (yes, it’s a remake of Exposé but a very loose one). He's not credited n the website or the trailer but he did do an early draft of the script.

Here’s the thing. On the evidence of his sketches for The Wrong Door and Shoot the Writers (the former I saw at the time, the latter are on his website) and this film, I see no evidence that Phillip Barron has the slightest idea how to write comedy. And yet, his blog is full of advice for wannabe writers about how to write comedy. The man drones on and on about his projects and his achievements without a hint of irony. If he acknowledged, as many full-time writers do, that the way to make a career in this field is to be able to produce the crap that producers ask for, on time and to specification, and leave your artistic pretentions on the coat-stand, then I’d say fair dos to the bloke.

That’s right, there’s no indication that it’s a mockumentary, or even a comedy. We might also note that Fairbrass’ psycho gangster is implied to be a major character when in fact he doesn’t even appear until one hour into the film. It’s almost like they want people to think this is some sort of gangster picture.

Now turn over the sleeve - very, very carefully - to see the one that was actually put in the case facing outwards, the one that was looking out from the shelves of Morrisons. No quote from Allan Bryce, no mention of ‘worst film...’. The copyline here is: ‘Get in on the ACTION... try not to get CUT!’ And on the back: ‘For this mob, the business is tough!!!’

Can you see how the print-out label style used for the title on the other side, and in all advance posters, and indeed on screen, has been replaced with a riveted-metal-sheets font and that the F has actually been turned into a pistol! (There are precisely no pistols in Just for the Record although there is one headbutt.) And while that’s a photo of Craig Fairbrass as Malcolm ‘Mental Fists’ Wickes, that photo of Danny Dyer certainly isn’t from this film.

There’s another, full-length shot of Dyer on the back, again looking like a gangster geezer (or maybe just like Danny Dyer) rather than the pencil-moustached, Clark Gable lookalike which he plays in this film. The role he took specifically to show people that Danny Dyer can play characters other than Cockney geezer gangsters. And what do Metrodome stick on the sleeve? A photo of Dyer looking like a Cockney geezer gangster, a geezer gangster-style font, some geezer gangster-type copylines, some badly punctuated text that implies geezerness and gangstericity. And a completely irrelevant London skyline just to emphasise that this particular gangster picture is set in Laandaan, innit. (It’s actually set in Croydon, a town which once boasted the UK’s largest second-hand record shop.)

We’ve all seen films misrepresented by distributors before but Just for the Record sets a new British and Commonwealth record for outright deceit in video marketing. In fact, I feel that I should quote the estimable Mr Fairbrass himself from his own website:.

"Just for the Record
   Craig would like to offer his sincere apologies to anyone who bought this film and thouht it was a London gangster thriller..its a comedy about low budget film making and I joint the project as an actor to be involved with other respected actors in a trendy comedy.
   The sleeve is totally misleading..its a shame because its damaging and I always want to treat my fans with total respect. please dont judge DEVILS PLAYGROUND or DEAD CERT..the same way.
   Thanks Craig"

Let’s look at what has happened here. Metrodome has acquired the UK rights to this film on the basis of a trailer and a frankly amazing cast list. They have agreed to give it a small theatrical release and then a push on DVD but they have asked for complete freedom in marketing. The film-makers, undoubtedly aware of what a stinker they have on their hands, have been happy to take the money and run.

Then Metrodome have taken a look at the finished movie and realised that they have bought a pig in a poke. It’s awful. It’s a self-indulgent, unfunny piece of crap with no story and a bunch of cardboard characters varying from despicable to dull. In the words of that noted gentleman of culture Mr Malcolm MF Wickes: “It’s absolute fucking shit. It’s got no story, it makes no sense, and it’s the same thing all the time.”

So: damage control. How can Metrodome minimise their losses on this thing? Well, the first thing to do is to reduce the ‘domestic theatrical release’ to an absolute minimum. There were 21 unadvertised, midday, midweek screenings in five cinemas in five small towns: Altrincham, Burnley, Leamington Spa, Stroud and Torbay. It’s quite possible that no-one saw it at all except for Phillip Barron and his three mates.

But what about the DVD? No-one will buy it on the recommendation of reviewers because any reviewers will simply echo the words of young Mr Wickes there. No-one will buy it on word-of-mouth recommendation from their mates. And the number of people who pick it up and buy it out of curiosity will be tiny if it is advertised as a spoof documentary about low-budget film-making.

It’s not a sequel or a remake or based on an old cartoon. It doesn’t have fabulous special effects or a name director. The one and only exploitable angle is the amazing cast, especially Danny Dyer who is, let’s face it, Mr Goldenballs right now as far as low-budget British DTV films go. But what genre is Danny Dyer associated with? Not comedy that’s for sure (despite Doghouse). No, he plays hard-as-nails geezer gangsters in films about East End, wide boy, didn’t-you-kill-my-brother geezer gangsters and gangster geezers. Innit.

And so someone at Metrodome said ah fuck it, let’s try and con people into thinking it’s a gangster film. We know they’ll hate it whatever they’re expecting so if they’re going to be disappointed that it’s shit, they might as well also be disappointed that it’s not even the film that the sleeve promises.

One final note, still on the sleeve. You will note that it is black, white and red. Both versions. And that is because there seems to be some sort of EU directive that all Danny Dyer films must be released with DVD sleeves that are black, white and red. Or at the most have a little dark sepia. Dead Man Running, The Other Half, City Rats, Goodbye Charlie Bright, Jack Said, Borstal Boy, Malice in Wonderland, The Last Seven, All in the Game, The Football Factory. Only Outlaw, Pimp and Doghouse display any colour other than red. Maybe it doesn’t apply to films with one-word titles? No, that’s no good - look at Severance and Straightheads.

It’s extraordinary, it really is. Have all these sleeves been designed by the same person?

As for the disc, there are no extras, not even a trailer, although it’s easy to find it on Youtube. There was an earlier trailer which was removed from Youtube that had most of the same clips but completely different music, which might be why it disappeared (alng with the film’s website of which there remains not a trace, not in Google cache, not at archive.org, nowhere). Also on Youtube, if you can be bothered to search around, are dull three-minute on-set interviews with most of the cast, two ‘deleted scenes’ totalling 48 seconds, a ten-minute AFM promo and a 30-second clip of Mayall in character which might be from a teaser trailer.

Anyway, that’s Just for the Record. It’s the ultimate recursive mockumentary. It’s a film that is ostensibly about an utterly shit film called Just for the Record, cack-handedly made from a dreadful script, which actually is an utterly shit film called Just for the Record, cack-handedly made from a dreadful script. And it’s taken me more than 8,000 words to tell you that. If this review has been a chore to get through, consider that I have at least saved you from watching the damn movie.

Once again I never set out to write such an epic review but it all seemed to run away from me. There is so much to be said about this film, almost none of it positive. I think we must consider it a blip on the careers of Dyer, Fairbrass, McAllister, Murray, Sothcott, Salmon, Berkoff and most of the others. Let’s instead look forward to Dead Cert and Devil’s Playground and all the other juicy stuff coming up from this gang.

MJS rating: D

Director: Takashi Yamazaki
Writer: Takashi Yamazaki
Producers: Hadome Yasuo, Sawabe Nobumasa, Kushino Takahito, Ando Oyahiro
Cast: Endo Yuya, Suzuki An, Katori Shingo, Sakai Miki
Year of release: 2000
Country: Japan
Reviewed from: Hong Kong Video CD (IVL)

I wrote the first English language preview of this film for the old SFX site in 2000, based on a promo reel I saw at Cannes. Having finally gotten hold of it (albeit on an unsubtitled VCD) I’m pleased to say that my initial enthusiasm was warranted. This is a really good, fun film.

At first glance, it appears to be a rip-off of ET, with a small, silver ball substituting for the wrinkly alien (rather ironic, given that ET was itself “influenced” by Harvey Cokeliss’ Glitterball!). In fact there’s a melange of influences, with nods - whether intentional or not - to The Last Starfighter, Independence Day, Replicator and Star Kid (which was itself basically The Guyver meets Power Rangers), plus the most blatant product placement since Mac and Me. But this is no simple clone - it’s a hugely enjoyable kids film with plenty of ideas of its own.

Ten-year-old Yusuke Sakamoto and his three pals - Toshiya, Hidetaka and Misaki (on whom Yusuke has a crush) - discover a small, spherical robot which has apparently crashed to Earth. The robot introduces itself as Tetra and somehow recognises Yusuke. Tetra builds himself a small body and has fun with the kids, who hide him from adults. Then they befriend Soichiro Kanzaki, inventor and electronics-shop owner, whose experiments even include a very crude form of time travel (he transports a drawing of Pikachu from Pokemon!).

Meanwhile, a huge alien armada is approaching Earth and a shape-shifting ET attacks and cocoons first Soichiro’s sister-in-law Noriko and then the inventor himself. The duplicate Soichiro is immobilised but later escapes, kidnapping Misaki. Tetra meanwhile has appropriated some parts from a local robotics firm and constructed a bloody great mecha, which Yusuke pilots to rescue his friend (having already piloted a version on a video game which Tetra programmed into his Playstation 2!).

The showdown between the semi-organic alien craft and the mecha is exciting and fun, and ends with the destruction of the entire alien fleet using, of all things, a swimming pool, but Tetra is damaged beyond repair. If you don’t cry at this point, you have no soul. That would be the end, but there is a fairly lengthy epilogue, set 20 years later which explains exactly where Tetra came from and how he knew Yusuke.

This was the directorial debut of FX supervisor Takashi Yamazaki and he did a terrific job, mixing action and excitement with some more emotional scenes, never allowing the subplot of young love to get in the way of cool explosions and robots. The CGI effects are pretty good, and the production design is terrific, both among the alien hardware and in Soichiro’s untidy workshop.

This Video CD is not only lacking subtitles but has been dubbed into Chinese without removing the Japanese dialogue track (as I speak no Chinese and very little Japanese, it made little difference) but the story is easy to follow anyway. The picture quality isn’t fab, but the image is at least letterboxed. Also includes a movie-related pop video by a singer called Zoie.

MJS rating: A-

Directors: Tim Osgood, Don Lenoir
Writers: Tim Osgood, Don Lenoir
Producer: Don Lenoir
Cast: Sam Stevenson, Robin Schnepp, Julian Lamoral-Roberts
Country: UK
Year of release: 2012
Reviewed from: online 

Remarkably, the title is not the worst thing about Nightscape: Dark Reign of Thanatos, a ridiculously over-ambitious gothic fantasy epic shot for about £2.50 and dragging on for about 100 minutes. God bless the guys who made it but it’s an absolute chore to sit through and took me several goes. This opening caption (as they say over at Cinemasins: “Reading.”) sums up the ghastly sub-sub-Tolkienism of the whole thing:

“Upon creating the he earth, the great god Zelos grew weary and so forged in his image two sons to uphold his kingdom and ensure its longevity, Aevum and Thanatos. As time progressed, so too did the intentions of the two sons. The second, Thanatos poisoned himself against the will of his brother and turned to blackness and evil for answers. From this new hatred the darkness bore a final battle to end the rule of either son - for their father lay dormant, undisturbed and unaware of his failing hopes...”

What?

There’s a whole load more in this vein narrated by someone doing an impression of Tom Baker as we watch an admittedly quite well-directed fight scene between Aevum and Thanatos on a beach. But the constituent parts of their costumes look very modern and one of them has a massive, unwieldy axe on a long, thin, wobbly pole which is just the most stupidly impractical weapon you’ll ever see. In fact, the sole point of interest is watching to see if this thing ever snaps.

The main story is set in the present day and stars Sam Stevenson as Curian, a wannabe comic-book artist who is The Chosen One - in some way and for some reason. Otheon (Robin Schnepp) is an acolyte of Aevum who wants Curian to defeat Thanatos but first he has to keep him safe from all sorts of marauding demons and oh dear God I really can’t face describing this bollocks any more.

You see, here’s the problem with fantasy epics. Unless you are going to tap into existing mythology of some sort, you have to create an entire world and make us care about gods and demons and prophecies and all sorts of malarkey that we have never heard of before. And that’s really, really, really difficult to do. Like so much other cut-price high fantasy, Nightscape: Dark Reign of Thanatos comes across as nothing more than a bunch of silly names doing inexplicable things for reasons that we neither know nor care about. I’m afraid it’s all just very, very boring.

Nightscape was produced, written and directed by two students from Plymouth University on a budget of about £3,000 and hey, all credit to them for putting this together. The photography, editing and special effects will stand them well as a show-reel - but that doesn’t mean that Nightscape itself is actually watchable or entertaining. In fact the one thing that stood out in my memory after finally making it to the end of what seemed like a week of sword fights, demon chases and wobbly axes was an unintentional repeated cock-up on the soundtrack.

Every time a character draws their sword, there is a ‘schhhh!’ noise on the soundtrack: the sound of a sword being unsheathed from a scabbard. The problem is that most of the swords are carried just in belt loops which, you know, wouldn’t make that noise. And once you spot this, it is impossible not to watch out for it every time a sword is drawn. Which is pretty frequently.

Produced in 2009, Nightscape was picked up for distribution by Reality Entertainment (the subdivision of Chemical Burn that releases all of Philip Gardiner’s films and dodgy conspiracy theory documentaries) who put it out on US disc in September 2012. The only recognisable name in the cast - indeed, the only actor with any other credits - is Julian Lamoral-Roberts from Bordello Death Tales, Nazi Zombie Death Tales and Chinese Burns. Cast aside, the credits consist almost entirely of Lenoir and Osgood, credited separately or together with direction, script, production, casting, props, costumes, locations, music and all points inbetween.

I feel a bit bad criticising the film because it is an achievement, but it’s an achievement that very few people will see because it’s so long and tedious. Lenoir preceded this with a sci-fi short, The Fabric of Life, and followed it with an Aleister Crowley biopic for Reality Entertainment which actually played at the London International Film Festival. Osgood is now apparently a management consultant.

MJS rating: C

Director: Mike Busson
Writer: Mike Busson
Producer: Mike Busson
Cast: Simon Willis, Bruce Lawrence, Forbes KB
Country: UK
Year of release: 2013
Reviewed from: YouTube
Website: www.facebook.com/ChangeShortFilm

The debut short film as director from actor Mike Busson, best known to you and me for his roles in Stag Night of the Dead and Bare Naked Talent, is a little ten-minute slice of urban gothic. While it does nothing new or unexpected, it’s well-made, sympathetic to its subject and doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Simeon Willis (Stag Knight, The Invisible Atomic Monsters from Mars) stars as a homeless man on the streets of London; Canadian Bruce Lawrence (also in Stag Night of the Dead and Bare Naked Talent plus Robbie Moffat’s Sisters Grimm) and Barbara D’Alterio are a ridiculously good-looking couple out window-shopping. The paths of these three people are clearly destined to meet. The ubiquitous Forbes KB (UFO, Airborne, Game of Thrones, A Day of Violence) is also in the cast.

Busson makes good use of recognisable London locations, shooting guerilla style among the Christmas shopping crowds, with DP/editor Raymond Brown providing sterling work in handling the many different light levels of night and day shots around the metropolis. The short film’s minimalist plot, while no great surprise, is at least thought-provoking without being preachy.

SNotD’s director Neil Jones helped out as assistant director here with Paul While (Psoro, Dead Love) providing the few make-up effects needed for one scene.

A solid debut from Busson, and another fine performance from the ever-reliable Willis: definitely worth ten minutes of your time.

MJS rating: B+

Director: Paddy Breathnach
Writer: Spence Wright
Producers: Mark Huffam, Michael Kelly
Cast: Arielle Kebbel, Andrew Lee-Potts, Martin Compston
Country: UK
Year of release: 2009
Reviewed from: online 

Andrew Lee-Potts is quite the horror star, isn’t he? He was in not one but two British fantasy series of the noughties: Andrew Marshall’s Strange (alongside Richard Coyle, Samantha Janus and Ian Richardson) and infantile ITV dinosaur nonsense Primeval (a show which had great promise in its first season then jumped the shark like nothing I’ve ever seen before).

On the big screen he was in The Bunker and 1408 and Return to House on Haunted Hill. He was in vampire movie True Bloodthirst for SyFy and an episode of the 2013 Dracula TV series and he was in a stage production of Dracula in London in 2012. And he was in Red Mist aka Freakdog, one of two horror films produced by Simon Bosanquet and Mark Huffam’s Generator Entertainment with funding from Northern Ireland Screen. Last week I watched Ghost Machine (‘from the makers of Red Mist’) so now it’s time to take a look at Red Mist, which Anchor Bay have very kindly made available for free through their YouTube channel.

Potts plays Kenneth, a young man with learning difficulties working as a porter in an American hospital. A completely unnecessary prologue combines footage of Kenneth fondling a female corpse in the hospital morgue with a flashback of his childhood when he saw his prostitute mother beaten up by one of her clients. Neither of these scenes will have any bearing on the rest of the film.

Next we are introduced to seven medical students who initially are pretty identikit. One is a goth, one is vaguely Asian, that’s about it, although they do become more clearly defined as the movie progresses. They go to a local bar and somehow stay for a lock-up (possibly one of them isn’t a med student but actually owns the bar - it’s a bit unclear). Kenneth stutteringly wants to join them but by that time they’re not only fairly drunk, they are also high on some pills which they swiped from the hospital pharmacy. Rejected and taunted, Kenneth heads off into the night but not before revealing that he has filmed the pill-swiping incident on his mobile phone.

Worried that this will destroy their careers before they have begun, the students persuade their nicest member, Cat (on whom Kenneth has a crush) to invite him back, but only so that they can render him unconscious and wipe his phone memory. Cruelly cajoled into drinking a cocktail of booze and drugs, Kenneth has an epileptic fit and falls off a table. After some heated debate, the gang decide to drive him to hospital but just push him out of the car and zoom off before being seen. Which they do.

See, here’s the basic problem. These folk are supposed to be junior doctors. And to be a junior doctor you need two things. First, compassion and empathy (okay, that’s two things but they’re related). I’m not saying no doctor is a bastard (hem hem, Harold Shipman anyone?) but normally if a doctor turns bad that's when they’re experienced, old, bitter and cynical. No-one trains to be a doctor unless they genuinely want to help people.

The other thing that tends to mark out medical students is that they are generally fairly sensible. And intelligent. That’s not to say that junior doctors don’t know how to partay. Wow, they can have some wild times and they can get blind drunk, although I think you’ll find that knocking back prescription drugs in a public bar, especially stolen prescription drugs, is pretty rare among trainee medicos. Mainly because they know what those drugs are and what effect they can have on a metabolic level.

So I just don’t buy the behaviour of these supposedly empathetic, intelligent junior doctors when they steal dangerous meds, force them onto a mentally disabled colleague and then decide to not call an ambulance in order to save their futures. There is a ring-leader of course, Sean (Scottish actor Martin Compston from Monarch of the Glen, whose other BHR credits include Doomsday, The Disappearance of Alice Creed, When the Lights Went Out, Piggy and Strippers vs Werewolves); the others are on a sort of sliding scale of shittiness between Sean and Cat. But still, essential though it is for the plot, this behaviour doesn’t ring true.

Anyways, the next day it turns out that Kenneth is in a coma from which he is not expected to emerge. Cat feels guilty, reads up some scientific papers and decides that she might be able to revive him with an experimental drug which she is able to easily obtain from the pharmacy by forging a senior doctor’s signature. But this drug doesn’t actually awaken Kenneth, instead it gives him the power to psychically control other people. And he sets about using this power to wreak revenge on the seven people who hurt him. Yes, it's an Irish version of Patrick. Maybe they should have called it Paddy? Maybe not...

We’re nearly halfway through the film by this point, but things are picking up. Not just the violence and gore - the second death in particular is absolutely stomach-churningly brilliant - but also the tension, the fear, the plot and even the characterisation. It’s somewhat ironic that the way-too-long first act, following on from the irrelevant prologue, means we only really start getting to know stuff about these people - like what their names are - once they start dying.

Freakdog (which is the term of abuse directed at Kenneth in the bar, then directed back at the victims) is considerably better than Ghost Machine. Not perfect by any means, but still generally good. The tension builds, we really feel for Cat’s plight as she tries to save both herself and her friends, and there is a rare example of a believable police investigation into the multiple murders. Plus a really impressive twist towards the end that changes everything Cat thinks.

On the downside, the film’s final sequence is just daft, involving a completely unbelievable escape from a police station and the sudden appropriation of a completely unlikely piece of electrical equipment. The film would have been considerably improved if it had ended bleakly after Cat’s twist. But there you go: what’s done is done.

This was the first (and so far only) produced script by Spence Wright, who is currently part of the team trying to generate funding for Vampires vs Leprechauns. He certainly crafted a good solid screenplay for this movie, albeit one that would have been improved by judiciously removing the first few pages and the last couple too. Director Paddy Breathnach is a Dubliner whose previous picture was Shrooms, well received but too Irish to be part of the BHR.

Cat is played by Yank Arielle Kebbel (Reeker, Aquamarine, The Grudge 2, The Uninvited, Vampires Suck and a recurring role on The Vampire Diaries), whose name is rather embarrassingly spelled wrong in the trailer. The five other medical students are played by Canadian Sarah Carter (Mindstorm, Wishmaster 3, Final Destination 2, Skinwalkers); Alex Wyndham (who is British but was in Dave Parker’s The Hills Run Red); Irish Katie McGrath (Morgana in Merlin and Lucy Westenra in the 2013 Dracula series); Londoner Christina Chong (Chemical Wedding, Johnny English Reborn and an episode of Black Mirror) who is clearly Chinese but playing a character with a Japanese name; and Michael Jibson (Devil’s Bridge, Panic Button) who is from Hull.

MyAnna Buring (post-Descent, pre-Kill List) has a small but important role as a nurse, and the senior doctors are played by Stephen Dillane (The Gathering, Game of Thrones) as the only character with a British accent, and twinkly-eyed Canadian actor Michael J Reynolds whose career goes right back to 1971 obscurity The Reincarnate and takes in Police Academy, Blue Monkey, My Pet Monster, Gorillas in the Mist, Extreme Measures and The Descent Part 2. According to the IMDB, among his 116 credits he has played 14 doctors, as well as 13 military officers, seven judges, five politicians (including two different fictional US Presidents) and one preacher.

Colin Stinton, who plays the detective investigating the case, is Canadian born but has a string of British credits including Ghostwatch, A Very Peculiar Practice, Tomorrow Never Dies, Ali G Indahouse, Thunderpants and the 2006 remake of A for Andromeda - plus The Bourne Ultimatum. Nick Hardin, playing a security guard, was in a horror film called Bad Karma - but not the Alex Chandon one!

Art Parkinson (Rickon Stark in Game of Thrones) is young Kenneth in the prologue, with Bronagh Taggart as his mother and Emmett Scanlan (Hollyoaks, Colour from the Dark) as the man. Derek Halligan - who was in Rawhead Rex and Enda Hughes’ legendary short film Flying Saucer Rock’n’Roll - plays the world’s most useless hospital pharmacist. Belfast’s Musgrave Park Hospital plays the fictitious Fort Haven Hospital, New England (a careless snafu sees the town name spelled Forthaven on the police cars).

Premiering at the 2008 Frightfest, Freakdog had a very brief UK theatrical release in 2009. Working out which title was used when/where is difficult even at this short remove, with various DVD sleeve designs existing online with both titles. The version posted online by Anchor Bay in 2011 uses Red Mist. Not that it really matters. This is a reasonably slick, reasonably gory, reasonably entertaining slice of British horror whose plus points (good cast, good story once it eventually gets going, solid direction) generally outweigh its minor failings.

MJS rating: B-

I met Dan Stevens in Slovakia in August 2003 when he was played Henry in the Hallmark production of Frankenstein. Nowadays he's a big star in things like Downton Abbey but this might well have been his first ever press interview. Part of this interview was used in a feature in Fangoria.

How did you get this part?
"I just came along and auditioned."

Have you done much acting before this?
"No, this is my first job. I’ve done theatre at university and a bit in London but this is my first movie job."

It’s a big one to start with.
"It’s a great role. It’s not too big, not too small. It’s got enough in there to get your teeth into, but it’s not too exhausting. I’m learning a huge amount. It’s great."

Have you seen many old Frankenstein movies?
"I think I’ve seen the Boris Karloff, I think I’ve seen the Branagh, I’m aware of lots of others - I think I have seen more than that. But it’s great to be adding to the legend, adding another one to the pile, doing a film that people can compare to, rather than a new film. It’s one that people can say, ‘Well, that was better than this one but not as good as this one’ - I’m not going to say which!"

It’s an interesting role because it’s a major one but it’s around the edge of the story. Henry is the voice of reason.
"Yes, he’s very much the balance, the comic foil and the dramatic foil. So in every scene it’s quite important, when Victor’s getting all mad and intense, he’s basically a normal student. Henry’s a very good friend to Victor, he’s a normal student enjoying a normal student life. Meanwhile, Frankenstein is not enjoying a normal student life. Frankenstein’s one of these guys who, if you’ve ever been to university, you never see them. I’m sure there are lots of people today who are building Frankenstein’s monsters in their own rooms - and you never see them. So it’s great to have someone who’s been a friend of his since childhood and is the other side of the coin."

How are you coping with shooting in Slovakia?
"It’s great! It’s very cheap, booze is very cheap! It’s very interesting. It’s probably more apt for ‘Drrrac-yularr’, but the accents of the crew and the people you meet in the town kind of adds a bit to the horror genre, maybe. It’s very, very hot, that’s the only problem. It’s much hotter than England."

Especially in that costume. What’s Kevin Connor like as a director?
"He’s very, very good. He’s very friendly, very approachable, which I think is important. I had this image, with my first movie job, of a hard-ass director going: ‘No, no, I want it like this!’ Kevin just gives very gentle advice. He often only has to say a couple of words and you know exactly what you’re doing.”

I interviewed Jim Wilberger in Slovakia in August 2003 where he was producing the Hallmark mini-series of Frankenstein.

In the Hallmark Frankenstein mini-series, Alec Newman played the title role - Victor Frankenstein himself. I was lucky enough to go on set in Slovakia for Fangoria where I interviewed Alec in August 2003.

How did you get this part?
"This came like a bolt from the blue for me. I got a phone call at half past ten in the morning one day from my agent. I hasten to add this never happened to me before, so I was a bit dazed for several hours. I got a phone call at half past ten and I was told about the project. I hadn't heard anything about it prior to that. And by the end of the day that information had become an offer. So I didn’t audition - which is definitely the way to get work!"

Did you have to think about it?
"I just read the script. I seem to have been involved in a lot of, not necessarily epic pieces..."

Dune is certainly epic.
"Yes, I’m really thinking about that more than anything. So I’m not someone who’s afraid of a project with scale, maybe something slightly more ambitious. This in a way is, in a lot of respects a lot more straightforward than something like Dune. It's a great, classic, gothic tale. But when I heard that it was Victor I was immediately very interested. Then looking at the script, it was very tightly based on the book. So there was absolutely no question about wanting to be involved with it."

I understand you’re working almost the whole shoot. Must be punishing.
"It is very punishing, yes. In fact, it’s kind of hit me this week. But I’ve done this kind of thing before where you’re working in almost every scene, and I seem to quite like it that way round. I think waiting around is one of the most tiring things you can possibly do - as I’m sure you know. Also with being tired comes a certain kind of inability to do extraneous crap in a shot. You just get on with it, you don’t over-embelish. I think it’s horrible when you watch someone who has come up with all these marvellous ideas and actually all you’re required to do is tell the story - get on with it - in as truthful a way as you can. Also, with Victor, the condition of being tired is not unhelpful in a lot of the scenes for Victor. Working twelve or more - in most cases more - hours a day, acting, is not unlike, I’m sure, the feeling Victor Frankenstein has when he stays up all night and tries to build this creature. So yes, it is very tiring but that’s not altogether a bad thing."

Had you read the book?
"I had actually read the book at school when I was 12 or 13 but it had really faded from my memory. In fact, one of the things I think about Frankenstein that’s very powerful but unfortunately quite misleading is its movie history and not the novel that it’s based on. It’s a bit similar to Dracula in that respect, apart from the time it was written in and Dracula and Frankenstein being two great gothic horror tales. So I’d read it but I had sort of forgotten it. It had been trudged over by the movie history as opposed to the literary history. So I read it again - completely actually. I’m not a fast reader but I read the whole thing on the plane from Los Angeles to here. We took off and I started reading, and ten minutes before we landed I finished it, so it was great. I didn’t have much time in terms of preparation, so I was determined to get through it as thoroughly and quickly as I could, and was able to do that fortunately. Otherwise I’d be screwed! But the script is very, very tightly based on that novel. I love it when you’re able to do that, to refer to a classic novel which your script is tightly based on on. Like Dune again."

Victor has been played many times by great actors. It’s big shoes to step into.
"Yes, I think there’s a certain relief, once it gets past a certain point. There have been so many versions of it, so many great actors who’ve played it, it sort of cancels itself out. I don't think anyone’s done it quite so tightly to the book, at least in the script form. I know that after we’ve finished there’s a lot of shit that can happen and you can end up... I don’t think this can ever be bubblegum but you know what I mean. It’s a long way from what we shoot to what actually is there. That’s to do with the Powers That Be unfortunately, and I haven't met them. So we’ll see.

"But it’s been around for so long and there have been so many versions. It’s not that the pressure is off but I feel strangely fresh actually looking at it anew. I’m not overly familiar with the actual movies. Everybody’s familiar with the image of Boris Karloff with a bolt through his neck. But if you take the fact that most people think Frankenstein is the monster and not the man who created the monster, that tells you how little people actually know about it. And that’s a great opportunity for this production to show people what’s actually in that novel. It’s a great thing: people go, ‘Oh shit, I need to go back and read that. Because I didn't think it was that. I thought it was about white overcoats and guys with green heads, when in fact it isn’t.’

"I think Mark Kruger has been very brave in this script: this thing speaks. People forget that. It’s not a grunting Robert De Niro. I loved his performance in many ways and disliked it in other ways. In the book, it’s not just ‘urgh urgh’, he’s quoting Milton for God’s sake! It’s very deliberate, Mary Shelley is very deliberate in how eloquent this creature is. Luke Goss is doing an unbelievable job in making that live. So it’s definitely not an obstacle. When you read it, you think, ‘Christ, I’m glad I’m not playing that!’"

Are you doing many action scenes?
"Yes, we’ve done a couple of scraps. Fortunately I’ve done a lot of that before. Most of it’s with Luke and he’s just finished a picture with Michelle Yeoh so no prizes for guessing that he’s all kung fu-ed up. But this is very character specific. Victor Frankenstein’s probably a bloke who’s never had a fight in his life, so there’s all these character considerations. Which means that you can act the fight instead of having to do cartwheels and massive kung fu kicks. It is a very physical role actually, I’m finding that. After twelve takes of a hysterical fit yesterday I’m finding that this is a physical role."

Have you done the creation scene yet?
"No, not yet."

What’s it like? Because there’s no creation scene in the book.
"I think he says ‘It was a dreary November when I uncovered the fruits of my labour’ - or however she puts it. Kevin Connor has had a great idea about the creature’s first breath. Without going into specifically what that entails, it is very specifically a very, very clearcut, sharp moment when life comes to the creature. That moment is life for the creature and the beginning of a horrible spiral for Victor."

Do you get to shout ‘It’s alive!’?
"Not ‘It’s alive!’ I wouldn’t want to steal Kenneth Branagh’s fire. Actually, I don’t think he said that, did he? I say ‘Live! Live!’ - but in utter frustration and despair that it isn’t working. Then of course this moment of life arrives. It’s just shock and horror and later agony and despair. It’s a very amusing story..."

How are you coping with shooting in Slovakia?
"Oh, it’s terrible. The women are horrible-looking. Of course, I don't drink, being a Scotsman. I hate it. No, it’s terrific. I’ve worked in Prague twice now for long periods, and this is very different to Prague. The historic centrum, the old part of the city, is pedestrianised and I think always has been. Great restaurants. But really there’s precious little time for me to do that. So I just do it anyway."

Dan Stevens and Nicole Lewis are both on their first production. Are they looking to you as experienced old hand?
"Not overly. They’re both terrifically scary in how natural they are. Dan was referring to it as his summer job from Cambridge for the first few days, and I told him to shut up. Nicole just looks like she’s been doing this for years but she’s only nineteen. I’m 28. I’ve been working for eight years now since I left college. To turn round to someone and say for the first time in my life, ‘Oh, you’re probably too young to remember this’ is quite an eye-opener. But they’re both terrific."

You’re playing the character all the way through from the young student to the final scenes.
"Obviously, in the book, it’s six or seven years. This is three hours of television. What’s very, very important is to track the boy-to-man angle, purely and simply in terms of age as a thing on its own, the make-up and hair. It’s marked by make-up and hair changes but it’s more marked by the narrative sections of the story and the pace at which sections move or become slightly less frenetic. That’s what marks the development of what’s happening. You know that a man who’s having a nervous fit and a following fever is somehow much more involved than the young man who's considering a future in science.

"So although there are make-up and hair changes, the story is not so driven. So it’s probably not going to feel like six or seven years like it does in the book. But then again, the way Shelley does that in the book is by going ‘I continued in the way I’ve described at Ingoldstat University for two years.’ And that’s it, that’s your two years in one sentence! So we can do the same with a cut to the next scene. I think the story’s strong enough. I worked this out just so I knew, found out whether the information was absolutely essential and I really don’t think it is. I don't think it’s a question people are going to ask because the story moves at such pace."

How is Kevin as a director?
"Great. I was saying to him the other day that, whatever happens on set, it all comes down to who’s in charge. Because Kevin is in charge it’s a very, very calm, controlled, easy-going atmosphere. Which is great - because the story isn’t easy-going or relaxed. He knows when to put his foot down, but somehow in such a short space of time he’s managed to create an environment where people are desperate to work for him, and that’s great."

Have you got anything else lined up after this finishes in September?
"Not at the moment. In the middle of all this I’ve managed to sneak a couple of audition tapes back to London and Los Angeles. There’s project back home with Tom Hunsinger and Neil Hunter in a film called Lawless Heart, which is ongoing. So there are a few things in the fire. I think I’ll be going back to London for a couple of weeks and then back over to Los Angeles."

Any plans for a third Dune?
"I don’t know what stage that’s at. Not that it would involve me hugely of course. There’s been a lot of changes at the Sci-Fi Channel and I don’t know how that’s affected those plans. John Harrison’s a great friend of mine and I know he’s developed the ideas and there’s a series written of maybe 16 episodes. But I’m sure if it doesn’t go with Sci-Fi it’ll go somewhere else. Because there’s a ready-made audience for that thing. It seems absolutely insane to me that they wouldn't pick it immediately and run with it."

Is that the next book?
"No. The gap between the second and third book, which was the second mini-series, and the next book, is three thousand years - so potentially that’s a lot of TV! That was the idea. Personally speaking I think the books are too complicated to film, I think they should leave them alone. I think we just got away with it with the second and third book. The idea of James McAvoy as a huge, prosthetic worm is a bit bizarre. God bless you, Frank, but what were you smoking?"

website: www.alecnewman.net

Nicole Lewis played Elizabeth in the Hallmark mini-series of Frankenstein. I met on the set in Slovakia in August 2003.

Jonathan Carlson was production designer on the Hallmark Frankenstein mini-series. I interviewed him when I visited the set in Slovakia in August 2003.

How did you get this job?
"I’m friends with the producers in California. I worked on Highlander: Endgame, I production designed that in Romania a couple of years ago. So I met Dan Gross. I just got back from South Africa and something had happened with their other production designer. Dan knew I had just got back so he called me and said, ‘Do you want to take off tomorrow to Slovakia?’ And I said, ‘Okay, I’ll go!’"

Had the previous production designer done much?
"They were in two weeks of prep. I guess he had problems with the producers or something happened, personal problems or something. But when I came in there was not much done. We scrambled and designed all this stuff and got it going but we had two weeks’ prep less than you’re supposed to have!"

It must be a challenge and a delight to do something this design-heavy.
"Oh yes. As a production designer you always enjoy this kind of stuff where you can push reality a little more and design more fantastic sets like rooftops and labs and boats and ship, and all these cemeteries and things like that. The one thing a production designer hates to do is be on some series decorating living rooms and kitchens. So yes, whenever you get the chance to do this kind of stuff, where you’re building ships and all kinds of fun things that you don’t normally do - oh yes, it’s a production designer’s wet dream!"

Did you do a lot of historical research?
"Yes, we did. I’ve done several period films. I just finished a period film in South Africa set in the 1900s so I just pushed back a little bit more from there. A lot of the research was right here in the town. You just get in your car and drive around the old part of the city and steal ideas: rooftops and old inns and that kind of thing. Take pictures with your digital camera, go back, design on a draft table and put it all together."

Is it set in a specific year?
"We’ve set it in the specific period 1820-1830. Not much changed in that ten-year period of time, so that’s what we’re basing the period on."

In any Frankenstein film the central set is the lab and yours is very cramped.
"The whole notion that we’re presenting on this film is it’s a little bit more reality-driven. The guy’s just out of college and he’s studying. We’re trying to keep it real, not so over the top. This isn’t some big castle and cranking the guy a hundred feet up into the space. They specifically wanted this kind of feeling for this Frankenstein, more realistic, less fantasy. There aren’t any Tesla coils bouncing around in the background and all that stuff. It’s just more reality-driven.

"Actually, that’s a pretty large set. This set was semi-dictated by the space of the stage. We always knew we were going to cram two sets in here. You have to have this much room for the crane and all this rooftop work. So we made the set as big as could possibly make it. If I could have made it a little taller and a little wider of course I would, but we’re completely maxed out on space here. It’s actually as big as it could be."

What about the equipment that he uses?
"There’s another good example. We don’t have some giant vat that looks like there’s no way the guy could even have made the thing. So what we have is: he found an old copper bathtub and he dragged that up there. So everything is reality driven. Real things. He found another tub and he turned that into a giant battery. Things that you could actually find in the village in that period of time. There isn’t that huge stretch. It’s set in the 1820s, there wouldn’t be some huge glass, Houdini-vat there. They wouldn’t be building that stuff, or big chains with cranks and wheels. It’s the 1820s. Okay, there’s a big lift in there that was used to lift furniture and things up into the building. Okay, that’s what he used to lift the monster up and bring him over and dip him into the bathtub. But if this was a real story, it’s probably a lot more in tune with the real things that were around in that day and age."

How are you finding working with a Slovakian crew?
"Excellent. They’ve all been very professional. They were given a challenge that not many crews could accomplish. I was quite amazed in South Africa at the calibre of people there, also Romania, Luxembourg, Mexico, and here in Slovakia. the secret of art directing and production designing is to get the full crew to believe that they can get it done. Our challenge on this one was we had six or seven major sets back to back with no cushion. By ‘no cushion’ I mean they didn’t go off and film a trail or some woods that we didn’t have to work on, so we could have a little breathing room to get the next set ready. Normally that’s how you would schedule a movie like this. But due to getting big actors, flying them in and flying them out, a week at a time, seven major sets had to be accomplished back to back in four weeks.

"You can take a look at the body of work: that ship, this building inside and out, the coastal farm, that whole snow set, the lecture hall at the university, a couple of others. All these had to be ready at the same time. We couldn’t even attempt to do it otherwise. If we had built one set at a time, that boat wouldn’t even be in there now. So we had to leapfrog crews day and night. No-one has had a day off in five weeks. We’re all blistered. So yes, in answer to your question, the Slovakian team has been very good! They’ve gone to war and back. They hit a wall a couple of days ago and now we’re still pushing to get the last few details in."

website: www.jonodesign.net

I met and interviewed cinematographer Alan Caso on the set of the Hallmark Frankenstein mini-series in Slovakia in August 2003.

How did you get this job?
"Nick Lombardo who’s an executive over at Larry Levinson Productions, he and I have done two projects together, both when he was still at Turner Pictures, TNT. The first one was Good Old Boys that Tommy Lee Jones had directed and the second one was George Wallace that John Frankenheimer had directed. Good Old Boys was just a two-hour and George Wallace was a four-hour mini-series. We really hit it off pretty well and stayed in touch. He called me up in May about another project that they had going which was King Solomon’s Mines. It went back and forth and then they lost the director and they didn’t know what they were going to do, they were waiting for another director. And in the meantime he said, ‘Would you be interested in shooting Frankenstein?’

"Any cinematographer would love to shoot a picture like Frankenstein, especially on a location such as Slovakia. The rich environs, the ruined castles, the villas, the old streets, the town squares, the village houses, the farms. So I jumped right on it. Then I got on the phone with Kevin Connor who’s the director and we talked a bit on the phone before I came on board. I really loved his concept, his approach to what he wanted to do, and I think he liked mine too so it was like a fait accompli after that."

I understand you’re shooting in Panavision. Why is that?
"To be honest, because it was the best deal I could get here. My original choice was to shoot with Zeiss lenses but it was difficult. It wasn’t so much of a money thing, in fact it wasn’t a money thing at all, it was an availability thing. They want to shoot this picture in three-perf, and ARRI in Munich did not have enough equipment to supply a three-perf show. They had just enough for us, the first unit, but second unit would have been a problem. They really bent over backwards seeing if they could scare up something but all this stuff was out, they’re very busy. What they did do was give us a tremendous deal on our lighting and grip package."

What’s so important about three-perf?
"If you’ve got a production that you know it’s not going to go theatrically, three-perf really does save a lot of money because you’re cutting your raw stock costs by 25 per cent, so I think that was really the reason for doing it. It’s little trickier because there’s very little room for error. if you’ve got a problem with the gate or hairs or anything like that, there’s no room to move."

What ratio is this in?
"Our final viewing aspect ratio? We’re shooting 4:3. they made the decision not to go 16:9 or high-def format, although they are doing a release in high-definition, but it will be in the 4:3 format. I’m not sure what the marketing strategy is at Larry Levinson productions. I personally think that everything should be done in 16:9 at this point, and most everything should be aired in 16:9. Right now NBC airs almost all of their prime-time television series shows in 16:9. But they’ve got a marketing plan.

"But one thing that’s for sure and I made it quite plain when I was brought on board: I would not try to serve both masters. I said they have to make a decision on what they want to do, 4:3 or 16:9, and that’s what we’ll shoot. If I can accommodate at certain shots, that’s fine, but there’s only one that you can really compose for. They said 4:3, so I said okay, what I will do is I will compose in 4:3 and I will just keep stuff clean in 16:9. In other words, I won’t have somebody standing around in frame or grip stands or something like that, but by no means will it be composed."

Can you explain this smoke?
"It’s just very light, it just creates an atmosphere. It’s not really smoke for smoke’s sake. Although in scenes where candles are burning or stuff like that it’s much more justified. It creates more of a period feel. People were inside during those days, everything was lit by candles and lamps, they were quite smoky environments in reality. So on a justification level it’s very justified, although I’m really just doing it for mood and feel."

How are you finding working in Slovakia on an international crew like this?
"Oh, it’s been great so far. There’s a difference in the way crews work here and what they’re used to, but that’s the same even with crews in the United States. It depends upon what you’re lighting style is. There’s two things. They’re having to adapt to a different way of working which is more western, but also they’re having to adapt to my lighting style, so it’s a double-edged thing that they’re having to deal with. But we’ve worked out a good system and it’s really been going quite smoothly. The first week was kind of rough."

Have you done any gothic horrors before?
"No, I haven’t. When I first started shooting I did my required amount of low-budget horror movies but nothing really classy, especially an icon like Frankenstein. So that’s the other reason why I really jumped at it because I wanted to really get into a really strong, gothic period piece."

Have you seen any other Frankenstein films?
"Oh, sure, yes."

To get ideas of what to do or not to do?
"No, not really. They’re in my collective memory, but to look at them now, so fresh before I start something like this, I think is more distracting than it is helpful. I’ve got a firm idea in my mind of what the feel was, but I really want to go into this, as I do on a lot of projects where there needs to be a fresh, original feel. It’s very organic to the material and it should come out of the material and not out of some germane experience that happened before when watching another show."

How are you finding working with Kevin?
"It’s been just great. Kevin is a great visionary. He’s got great taste. He doesn’t dilly-dally. He gets his performances, he doesn’t try to search for the performances. He’s of the belief, and I agree with him, that the best performances are usually in the first couple of takes when the material’s fresh. He likes to move on, he doesn’t over-cover. He comes up with really fun ideas and he’s got a great grasp of the gothic nature of the material. I think we’re all interested in doing more than just a horror movie. I think there’s a number of thing. There’s a very strong romantic setting that takes place with Victor and Elizabeth. So there’s a romance going on. The creature is a very sympathetic character although he’s also a killer and dangerous. But there’s so much pathos and sympathy about the character. Luke Goss is doing a terrific job about bringing that out. He has really taken that character and given him many dimensions."

The sets are really cramped. It must be very difficult getting lights and cameras in there.
"They are, but once again lighting before the turn of the twentieth century was all very natural. Most light that was in an interior during the day came in through the windows. Anything after that, night interiors or day interiors that are very dark that needed interior lighting, it’s all very source-y. So I’m just playing the sources as they are and letting things go, letting it all drop off. I’m not putting any lights inside - it’s all being lit through windows so that’s bringing into the natural, organic way. All that kind of stuff contributes to the total feel of the show, of the material, because that’s what was natural at the time. It only helps here because it’s a dark, moody, gothic show."

In the UK, Six Feet Under is a huge hit. have you been with it from the start?
"Right from the start, yes. I didn’t do the second, third and fourth shows, only because I was on another feature at the time so they found somebody to come in to fill in for me until I could become available again. That show is a completely opposite approach. When I shoot that show it’s all a tremendous depth of field, lot of deep focus, all wide-angle lenses. The way I’ve done this show is a very, very narrow depth of field, a lot of long lenses, a lot of selective focal planes. Adding a lot of atmosphere, just with the smoke and stuff. A lot less defining and a lot more letting things drop off into the shadows, and capturing that different kind of mood. So it’s fun because I get to do something different."

The shadows must be important. Almost as important where you don’t light as where you do.
"It’s actually more important: what’s implied rather than what is seen."

I don't interview many first assistant directors, I must admit. It doesn't sound like an important job - most people would assume it's basically the director's assistant - but actually the 1st AD runs the set, leaving the director to concentrate on the actors. Michelangelo Csaba Bolla was one of a whole bunch of interviews which I didn in August 2033 when I visited the set of Frankenstein in Slovakia.

How did you get this job?
"I worked with Kevin Connor, the director. We did two films before together. So if he has something and I’m available, we try to work together."

Have you worked in Eastern Europe before?
"Yes, I have worked all over Europe: Hungary, Croatia, Germany, Italy."

How are you finding Slovakia?
"I like it. Really good facilities."

This must be one of the first big productions out here.
"No, I think they did some big productions. Not too many films but once every couple of years they had some big films coming over. Uprising was shot here a couple of years back and Dragonheart was also shot here. So they have some experience with bigger productions."

Is this crew very experienced?
"Yes, I would say so. They’re pretty mixed because there are people from other countries as well, from Austria, Hungary, Croatia, America, England."

How do you cope with having such an international crew?
"For me it’s normal, because as I said I’ve worked all over Europe and the world, and most of the time that’s the case. You have local crews, you have people coming in from all different countries. You take the language issues into consideration and quickly try to learn the local way of working."

I watched Kevin directing and it all seemed very smooth and calm. He seems to let people get on with it.
"Kevin has very clear ideas what he wants to do, but by nature he is a very quiet and calm person. For me, that’s why it’s very nice to work with him. You ask questions, you get answers. He’s ready to compromise when there are problems or issues, and never loses his temper. And it reflects in the whole crew. Everybody is much calmer, they know there won’t be a screaming, yelling director if there’s a problem."

I interviewed Mark Kruger, writer of the Hallmark Frankenstein mini-series, by phone in September 2003.

How did you get the job to write Frankenstein?
"It was pretty simple. Most jobs you have to do your audition and go through endless meetings. The nice thing was they came to me. They had read some screenplays I had written and liked, I guess, what I brought to those stories. So we met and we talked about the script in relation to the novel, and what they were looking for. They wanted to do not just a two-hour movie but they wanted to do a four-hour mini-series which meant that you could incorporate a lot more of the subplots and scenes that sometimes, just because of time, you’re not able to incorporate. So that was a creative meeting of the minds, with Mike Moran and those guys. It was very useful, it wasn’t an ordeal, so I don’t have any horror stories."

It must be daunting to take on a story like Frankenstein which is not only very well known, but very well known wrong.
"Absolutely, very much so. But it was also thrilling. It is certainly one of the icons of western literature over the past 200 years and it has been done so often, you might think: who wants another Frankenstein? But I guess what I was looking for, my approach if you wanted to say that, was that I was looking for the humanity in it. In rereading Mary Shelley’s novel - I had read it several times over the years - I was struck by how much she had left out of the story. There’s so much that is implied, and things that happen off-screen, that we don’t see, that we’re told about. It’s a lot of people telling people. It’s Victor recounting his story to Walton, it’s the monster recounting his story to Victor, so there’s a lot of that; it’s not your typical novel. It’s a lot of telling events.

"So the challenge for me was constructing, though there’s a great structure in the book, but constructing full-blooded characters. And taking things that we’ve seen a million times before in every Frankenstein movie, and hopefully trying to just give it maybe a little bit of a different spin, so that I’m not doing what’s already been done. For me, what I wanted to bring out was the humanity of the creature. The full notion of Mary Shelley, at least what I got from Mary Shelley, was that science has consequences. There is no pure science that does not have repercussions, unintended repercussions. So our actions, everything that we do, even in the best intentions, sometimes have unintended repercussions. Another thing that I gleaned from it was that monsters are created by human beings, they’re not born. Victor’s work, in and of itself, was not really something horrible. Yes, maybe from a certain religious point of view it was immoral to do what he did. But science, in terms of what his pursuit was, the pure science, it was kind of a noble idea. He really wanted to try to help people, and the idea that maybe this could help cure diseases.

"It was at the dawn of the industrial age, the enlightenment in Europe when all these ideas were floating around, and she put them all into this one story, this incredible mythic story. For me what was so important was that idea about parents’ responsibilities to their children, how what we raise goes out there in the world and there are consequences and repercussions, and that this doesn’t happen in a vacuum. So that Victor, being younger than most of the characters we’ve seen portrayed on the screen. the times we’ve seen him portrayed he’s been little bit more mature, in his thirties. We’ve tried to make him faithful to the book, which is that he was late teens, early twenties, and he was full of the folly and the grandiosity of youth. But it’s not until he sees in the light of day what he’s done that he realises the consequences and that it’s too late to stop it. So that’s a long-winded answer."

The book has this concentric structure which is like five acts. How have you turned that into something that fits a mini-series with ad breaks and a big climax halfway through.
"Actually Mary Shelley did all the heavy lifting for me. What I did was: my first task was to go through the book and I basically extracted every scene in the book that I thought was important, that should be in the movie. I put it on file cards and I just laid it out in an outline and looked at it. And what was surprising to me was that the first act, which in traditional movie is the first 30-some pages of the script, kind of laid out nicely. I put this wrap-around, starting on Walton’s boat, and there’s maybe seven or eight minutes of that with the adult Victor right before his climactic meeting with the monster. Then flashing back to Victor as a child, bringing in members of his family, his relationship with his mother which is so important, his father and this idyllic world that they lived in. Then the death of his mother is a nice ending point of that first act, and his leaving to go to university. So that was a beautiful transition to go into your traditional; second act of a movie.

"Fortunately for me, Mike and all those guys said to me: don’t write this as a traditional mini-series, which means that there are seven acts per night. They said just write it as a movie, don’t worry about the acts, just let the story unfold in a natural way. And in doing so we found certain natural points. The midpoint of the first night is the creation of the monster, Victor realising what he’s done, and the monster taking off and Victor being left sick, when Elizabeth comes to him. So that’s a nice mid-point of the first night. And then the end of night one is Justine’s - the serving girl - trial and execution for the murder of Victor’s little brother. Then Victor’s leaving the family once again to go to track the monster. So that’s another turning point in the story, and that seemed to be a natural night one break.

"Then night two, the meeting of the monster in the beginning, where Victor really comes face to face with his creation that has now learned, has been out in the world and had experiences of love and hate and violence, and has been really wounded by it. So that sets Victor off on another task, which is the monster says: make me a mate. So Victor goes to do that and then can’t go through with it. Then there’s another nice bit which is when Victor’s friend Henry is murdered, and Victor is brought in for questioning. Clearly he’s not responsible but clearly the monster has accelerated his revenge and then there’s Elizabeth’s death. So all of that fits nicely into those natural breakpoints we want in the story. Fortunately they were in Mary Shelley’s story. I just laid them out and they seemed to me to make a nice structure for four hours."

One scene that’s not in the book is the creation scene. How did you deal with that?
"I read up a lot about science and medicine, and a lot of the experiments that were done somewhere between 1795 and 1805. the book takes place somewhere around the turn into the 19th century. So I looked at what was happening. The advent and discovery of batteries and electricity. So I took from that the idea of creating a giant battery. We’ve seen bits of that done before in other Frankensteins, but I really went to the source of what was happening in science and medicine at that point and just constructed that would be realistic, that would kind of fit into what hopefully would have been Mary Shelley’s conception of it.

"In a way, she cheats the audience because she doesn’t fill that in. It’s a line: he does it. You obviously want to visualise it because that’s a lot of the fun: setting up the laboratory, what it would have looked like back then. So my intent was to make it as realistic as possible, and I know that Kevin Connor the director and the producers wanted to give it that reality, so that it was true to the time. We were trying to be true to the spirit of the book. So that’s what I did, was try to do a little research, envision what would have been likely scenarios if someone wanted to do that back then."

It must be tricky to write because it’s a monologue, and also we’ve seen it parodied so many times.
"That’s true because I kept on thinking of Young Frankenstein and laughing. ‘Oh my God, let’s just get Peter Boyle...!’ I guess what I did was I laid in few precursor scenes that weren’t in the book that I thought were important to Victor’s development and science. I gave him a dog when he and Elizabeth are growing up. The dog has a horrible accident and he tries to revive it, first by the hocus pocus magic that he’s been studying. All the ancient stuff. He realises that that’s a sham and that’s what compels him to go to university. Then there’s a sort of parallel theme in that part of the university when he’s studying and learning, that there’s another dog, a stray dog in the streets of Ingoldstadt that gets run over by a carriage. He now tries to revive it by a medical procedure, using electricity and wires. He kind of animates it for a moment and then it doesn’t survive, so he realises that there is at least merit in what he’s doing. So I try to underplay it.

"We wanted to make it a big scene but not make it overly hysterical and manic. The fact that he does it and he thinks it’s not going to work, and then the monster moves and he totally unravels. When you take something on and you think it’s not going to work and you’re hopeful it will work but you really believe in your heart that it won’t work - and then it does and that freaks you out. I think that’s what I was aiming for: that innocence that Victor had, that fever that engulfs him to accomplish something. that sense of when you’re really young and inspired. So putting him in that place and making him young will hopefully undercut the comedy that could come out of it. I tried not to play into those iconic scenes too much because there is that danger that people will look at it and laugh. So I was trying to hit those notes but without duplicating or playing the hysteria that would make them silly. That was my intention."

How many drafts did the script go through?
"I would say there were three full drafts. The first draft was a pretty tight draft. I really tried to keep the story lean. I didn’t want to over-write it. There were things that we expanded upon when we saw how it laid out in terms of timing of the story, because things can seem short on the page but then play longer, especially action. Fortunately we were able to fill in a little more of the scenes between Elizabeth and Victor and expand that. Then the third draft was really location stuff. We were going to shoot in a morgue but could we do it in a cemetery; things like that were predicated on what they had scouted locations for over in Slovakia and Austria.

"There were a number of interstitial little scenes. Kevin would say: okay, we just cast Donald Sutherland. He’s obviously a more mature Walton, so we need to just rewrite some of his lines. So it was tailored to the actors that we cast and just time, but really I would say it was close to the first draft in spirit. It was just clarification, bringing up the emotional stuff a little bit more. What I really wanted to focus on also was Victor and Elizabeth, their relationship and their love affair. And also the creature’s learning sequence. We were able to give it a little bit more breathing room than happens normally in the movies because you don’t have much time.

"One scene that I really wanted to put in there because I felt it was psychologically important for the creature, was that he witnesses the farm family that he is hiding out and learning from, which is in the book. But I wanted him to witness the husband and wife making love, to get that emotional thing that he’s missing, that sense of closeness and connection with people. that’s obviously something that’s not in the novel. But to me it really felt important to hear Victor’s story, that he’s in love with Elizabeth and he’s going to get married and so on, and to then contrast that with the creature who has this same yearning, to want that which is truly denied him because of what he looks like and who he is. It’s an important emotional point for the creature, the tragic nature of it, I just thought that was crucial. So that was a sequence that I brought in that wasn’t in the book."

What about the dialogue? Have you had to update it?
"There’s a lot of stuff that I take from the book, a lot of lines that are really good, really strong, especially for the creature. Then what I try to do is just put it through the updating blender and do that thing that writers do: make it a little more fluid and conversational. I’ve tried to give it a little more of a contemporary feel but not too much because then it would be silly. So I’ve tried to keep the spirit of it but make it hopefully play a little more naturally."

There have been previous Frankenstein films touted as ‘faithful to the book’ but you can’t be completely faithful. Is this version ‘faithful to the book’?
"I would say it’s pretty faithful. If you’ve read the book in the past and vaguely remember it, this movie will feel pretty faithful. Certainly the major beats in the story are faithful to the book. So I would say it’s semi-faithful! It’s pretty faithful; I would not say it’s a hundred per cent faithful because it’s just not. There is stuff that’s been brought in. Obviously there are things that don’t make sense in the book in terms of the logic of it. It takes place in the Arctic: okay, realistically, coming from Switzerland, how did Victor make it there? He supposedly treks through Russia? Finland? It kind of defies logic. We play with that, but the logic of it, we try to make the story work logically and emotionally.

"There’s a lot in Mary Shelley’s book that she fudges. I’m not going to interpret for her, but my impression is that she was going to make a point. Reading the letters that she left about the story, the various writings that remain, she was writing a Big Story and was concerned about the Big Ideas, not the little nuances. It’s only about 210 pages. It’s not filled with huge sweeping character scenes. There are the scenes between Victor and the monster, those are the biggest character scenes, that whole sequence where the monster’s relaying to Victor relaying to Walton.

"I’m a structuralist as a writer. To me, that’s what’s important about storytelling, is to create the structure. So Mary Shelley gave me a really great structure, and I tried to build that house, and then shade it a little bit differently because a lot of it’s not in the book. A lot of it’s there and yet a lot of it isn’t. To me, what would make me happy is if people say, ‘Oh, it’s pretty faithful.’ To feel like it’s in the spirit of the story. I didn’t intend to do a literal adaptation because as you say, it just would not be that exciting."

What’s your own background. I know you write Candyman 2 and worked on a couple of unmade Wes Craven projects.
"I’ve been writing for a number of years out here, mostly I guess in the horror/supernatural genre. I really love it, those are the things I grew up with. I grew up in New York and moved out here in the late 1980s. I worked a little bit in the development side of the business, as an executive working for various producers. Doing that work of reading dozens of scripts a week, meeting with writers, developing projects, trying to set them up with the studios. Then I transitioned and wrote a script, and that set me off on the writing career and took me to here. Right now I’m working on a movie for CBS, a sort of supernatural thriller/love story. I’m also adapting Blade as an animated series for MTV and Marvel. I’ve written the pilot and now we’re going through some rewrites. We have animators now doing the first sketches for the series of characters. that’s been a lot of fun."

Will that happen before Blade 3?
"Blade 3, I think they’re going to start shooting pretty soon. This is kind of on its own track. The lead time with animation is pretty long. I would say Blade 3 probably will be out before the series. This is like a companion piece. MTV this year did Spider-Man as an animated series, it’s on around ten o’clock in the evening here, and that’s been very successful for them. So Blade is the next piece they wanted to do. That’s been a lot of fun because it’s a great story and great characters, but also for an animated piece you can do a lot with it. We have diverged from the movies. The movies created their own vision; David Goyer and those people created their own world. I’ve taken it in slightly another direction. It won’t just be a retread of the movie, hopefully it will be something different and fresh. Just the conception and the look of it. We want to give it its own look. There’ll be new characters; there’ll be Blade and Deacon Frost but there’ll be other characters that were not in the movies that come from the original comic book series."

Will Wesley Snipes do the voice?
"We don’t know, but I doubt it. I would be surprised if he did. Because obviously Wesley is a grown man and the MTV audience is skewed younger. So I think what we’re going to do is try to make Blade just a little bit younger. They want to keep the edginess and the sexiness and the violence in it, because what are vampires without violence and a little blood? Especially in an animated series where you can do a lot. So they want to give it an interesting look, influenced by Japanese anime, something fresh. So anyway that’s been a lot of fun. I’ve worked with Clive Barker obviously: Candyman 2, and Bill Condon was the director of that. Then Wes Craven, I did a TV pilot for him and then adapted this novel, Drowning Ruth, which is a little bit of a departure. It’s about three generations of women, kind of a suspense mystery. It was an Oprah Book Club title, much more of a female-driven story. Wes is going to direct it himself. So I’ve done a lot of stuff in this genre but I also do a little bit more dramatic stuff, and comic too. So that’s how I’ve come to it."

Have you been out to Slovakia?
"No, I didn’t make it out. I communicated a lot with Kevin on the phone and I’ve seen dailies. I’ve just had a very busy summer and their schedule was such that, the times I could have gone, they were off. The first two weeks were moving every day or two and it would have been hard to be there and tag along, so unfortunately I didn’t make it out there. I‘m thrilled with the dailies, I have to say. It’s visually stunning and I thought that Alec Newman is really good as Victor. He really has the youth and the passion. And also with people like William Hurt and Donald Sutherland and Julie Delpy, it’s an interesting cast. I’m excited to see the first cut and how it all comes together. I feel that Kevin was really faithful to my script and really took it upon himself to protect it and to protect everything that was important in it, that we felt was important storywise and emotionally. So for better or for worse, I can say that they shot my script. You hear lots of people say, ‘Oh, I blame the director.’ But I’m really thrilled. It was a wonderful experience and I feel really fortunate."

I interviewed costume designer Barbara Lane in Slovakia in August 2003 on the set of the Hallmark Frankenstein.

Tell me a little about your background.
"I used to do Doctor Who. I used to make the costumes in my office at the BBC. Whenever I do any funny shows like Dungeons and Dragons or Monkey King, I say, ‘It’s all right, I did Doctor Who, I know all about these things.’"

When did you work on Doctor Who?
"1971, possibly, to about 1976. Pertwee and Tom Baker. I did quite a few with Tom. In fact, when we did Dungeons and Dragons in Prague the director who was Canadian - they got Doctor Who in Canada - said, ‘Could we get Tom Baker in?’ So we got Tom in to do a part."

How did you get involved with this?
"Somebody offered me a job! Because I work in Prague a lot, I’ve done nine films in Prague, and they obviously wanted to use as many local crew as possible. I wanted to do it, and they were nice people. I only work with nice people."

Have you done anything for Hallmark before?
"Yes, I did Monkey King in Prague but I don’t think it was because of that that I got this."

How does Bratislava compare with Prague?
"The things we made in Prague, you can’t get a lot of stuff in Prague, a lot of people import stuff. Here it’s totally different. We’ve got one guy that sews for us here who’s great. There’s no resources in the costume line except what’s at the studio and if you don’t happen to be doing that look, it’s not there. But I have rented peasant clothes and stuff from here. You go around and back to Prague to get stuff, and the rest of it you have to make."

What’s the biggest challenge on this shoot?
"The biggest challenge on any mini-series is getting enough stuff because it’s like two or three feature films at once and no scene lasts more than half a page. Dozens of sets, very, very intensive. For me, it’s just the challenge of getting everything there and having it right. The period costume side’s fine because I know the periods very well, after doing it for ... a lot of years. Also we’ve had good producers and good actors which is very important when you’re working at this pace, because the pace is very, very hard. When Luke Goss arrived and I’d done all his stuff, he was very happy with it. We were obviously on the same wavelength without even talking. I just saw him as being a guy who had picked up stuff here and there, rationalised how he came to be where he is. In the book, where he leaves, he goes into the woods and just gets stuff. So I put it all together and made him what he looks like now. It worked fine."

For Frankenstein and his family, are you creating some fancy clothes?
"No, actually. It’s never done in a realistic manner, and I like to do clothes, not costumes. So I tried to make them look as though they live in the equivalent of an English country house, and we know what they look like: they’re a bit shabby, they live in their clothes, they don't look as though they’ve been to the hairdressers every morning."

They are meant to be a relatively poor noble family.
"His father’s a lawyer. They’re not broke, but people don’t show their wealth like they do in a vulgar way. I won’t go into my stories about people showing their wealth but I’ve come across it quite a lot in the programmes I’ve done. So I’ve tried to make them look as they would be, a real family, living in a house and having people round them, and doing things that normal people do. I’ve not made them unacceptable to me and the audience. I hope people know who they are by what they’re doing and what they’re looking like. That’s all I can do, really."

What about the Arctic scenes?
"Funny you should mention that. I’m working on that as we speak. I haven’t got a lot of furs, and between now and the weekend I’ve got to work out how I’m going to make them. Because they were actually whaling fisherman that he took on the boat, so they’re a mishmash. And I think that’s what they want. They don’t want them to look as though they’re all in Eskimo clothes. I’m going to start making some stuff in the next two days because we shoot in the next few days."

It sounds like you’ve done a lot of research.
"Oh yes, you read the novel. You can’t do this without knowing what you’re doing. And I wanted to do it! I don’t think it’s ever been done in the way that it should be done."

Are you liaising closely with Kevin Connor?
"I do see him occasionally. He’s good, he’s wonderful. I think everybody would work with Kevin over and over again because he’s a really nice guy. Things don’t always go right but if 99 per cent of it goes right that’s okay with me."

Are you based in Eastern Europe now?
"No, but I seem to be able to work there comfortably. I only work for people I know. I don’t have an agent or any of that. Producers I know, directors I know, I work with them. That’s what I do."

In designing the costumes, did you have to go through a lot of versions?
"No. I have been doing it a while and I do know what they look like. We’ve never had a meeting about the production, ever. I kept saying: when are we having a production meeting? Never."

I expect they left you to get on with it because of your experience.
"Or there wasn’t time or something, I don’t know. Also, you don't know until the actor turns up what it’s going to be like. Nobody really knows until it’s put on the actor anyway. Donald Sutherland comes on the 11th and shoots on the 12th!"

Do you know what size he is?
"Yes, I’ve spoken to him, and I’m knitting his sweater for him. Which is going to be a front and a back because it would be too hot with the sleeves. We’re all knitting scarves and stuff, there’s a cottage industry going. I never considered Frankenstein as horror, I suppose it is horror."

Well, it’s a horror icon, but the actual story is a gothic romance.
"Absolutely. They were entertaining each other, Lord Byron and Shelley. It’s just an idea that came through. Obviously when you read it, you know she didn’t have much information about other things going on in that period. Switzerland was a protestant haven, they had a different look and all that. But you’re not going to tell an audience that: this is why it looks so boring, because they were all nonconformists."

Roger La Page was co-producer on the Hallmark Frankenstein. I interviewed him on set in Slovakia in August 2003.

This is a 200-year-old book with three narrators and no creation scene. How do you turn that into something that modern audiences will enjoy?
"Well, the book’s been a classic for a long time for a certain reason. There’s a genre of people who think that this is the absolute greatest of novels. Kevin Connor’s creativity comes into things that were not said in the book, almost like making segues between chapters that she left unsaid, or left to your imagination. So many people in the past have tried so hard to create elements that just could not be. Everybody ignores the fact that he was a student. He was a student in school, he was 18 years old, 19 20 21. The things in his lab are primitive and he just uses basic elements. Other productions have crowded his lab with so much unbelievable junk and techno-whizz stuff that it loses the one thing that we don’t want to lose - which is the credibility of the book.

"The book was written in a simple form at a simple time with elements that were far beyond her imagination. There was no land between Geneva, the mountains and the far north, but we’ve had to create distance. Because it took him five or six years of travel and trekking and following his creation before their tumultuous finish. The things like the lab and how this monster was created. Because he tried very hard to make it a perfect being. This was the original Six Million Dollar Man. He was tall, he was strong, he was handsome. Well, none of the other creative people have bothered to stick with that. They have tried to conceptualise what people want. The thing that has endured over the years with the book is how perfect the book really is. The story itself is simple. So we’re telling the story that Mary Shelley wrote about. Her imagination is being filled in just with segues that take us from one chapter to another. It’s good to follow the book, I think."

Have you watched many other productions?

Gabe De Cunto was in charge of the special make-up effects on the set of the Hallmark Frankenstein, which is where I interviewed him in August 2003.

What’s your actual role?
"I do Luke Goss’s prosthetic make-up. I work for Almost Human, Rob Hall’s prosthetic make-up effects company. Robert Hall designed it and fabricated all the pieces. He was here, and he left me to finish."

How long does it take to get Luke made up?
"It’s takes us about four and a half hours, unless it’s the full-body. If it’s the full-body it’s about six and a half hours."

And how long to get it off at the end of the day?
"About 45 minutes. It’s like building a sandcastle."

How is it actually constructed?
"The pieces are made out of silicone. You can see the silicone’s really translucent, almost like real skin. It’s painted with tattoo colours, the alcohol-based make-up paint that we use. It’s actually got stitches and threading inside the stitches. There’s markings on the body where Victor made notes and wrote all over it. Luke actually loves that. He said it’s so disrespectful to write on someone’s body like it’s an object."

The facial make-up?
"That’s silicone as well, yes. Six different appliances that get glued onto Luke. At the end of the night we throw them away. Brand new pieces the next morning."

Do you have a big supply of them here?
"We do, but they keep playing catch-up with us. They send more stuff from the States. We’ve got the wig that goes on at the end of the make-up. This is the final piece that locks him in, and he starts getting into his character."

How is he to work on?
"He’s great. This is an extremely difficult make-up to wear. It’s difficult for him but he’s doing really well. He’s very patient, he’s a great guy. If he wasn’t to begin with, I think it would be a lot more difficult for him."

Does it need a lot of touching up during the day.
"Yes, throughout the day. Especially in this weather. It’s been really hot these few days. So it’s a constant upkeep to keep it from falling apart."

Have you done stuff quite like this before?
"Yes, pretty much. I’ve been doing this for twelve years now. I just recently worked on movie called Van Helsing, a Stephen Sommers film. I did Planet of the Apes, Men in Black II, Nutty Professor 2, The Grinch. Prosthetic is mainly what I do."

What’s the biggest challenge on this production?
"When we do the full-body, that is the biggest challenge. Just trying to keep Luke comfortable, which is impossible because of the nature of the make-up."

He must sweat like a pig under all that.
"It’s extremely hot. It’s worse than wearing a wetsuit because a wetsuit at least kind of breathes. This just keeps everything inside. Yesterday we had crew members wearing T-shirts and shorts, and they were sweating like pigs, so you can imagine Luke standing in there. It’s a brutal make-up to do. Meg Tanner is my assistant and she’s Luke’s personal make-up artist. She does beauty make-up on him, the straight make-up, but she’s actually doing really well helping me with gluing prosthetics which is something entirely new to her."

Is the make-up constant, or does it deteriorate in terms of continuity?
"The make-up doesn’t change as far as the pieces, but the colouring does. He tends to be fresher at the beginning then he starts rotting a little more and a little more. The bruising changes, but that’s about it."

Do you have to make up a stunt double too?
"Luke’s done most of his stuff but we do have pieces standing by in case we do need to do a stunt double. The straight make-up department has done a stunt double and they just actually went in and painted to simulate the pieces. They did a great job, it looked beautiful."

When I visited the set of the Hallmark Frankenstein in Slovakia in August 2003 for Fangoria, one person I really wanted to speak with was make-up effects legend Rob Hall. Unfortunately, Rob had returned to the States by then but he very kindly agreed to a phone interview the following month.

How did you get this job?
"I had done Monster Makers, which is this fun little kids movie, for Kevin Bocarde who is one of the producers over there and Larry Levinson. I’d done that for them and basically that was it. So when Frankenstein was coming up, I’d just done all the creatures for this fun little Hallmark thing so I was the first person they called, I guess the only person they called. So it was cool. We leapt at it. As a creature designer, to be able to reinterpret something like that is really cool."

It must be daunting because you have the iconic Jack Pierce make-up and all these other versions.
"This particular make-up was daunting. Our original ideas for it were a lot more far out than what we ultimately wound up on. The only thing daunting, frankly, was just the sheer volume of people we had to go through to finally achieve the ultimate design. A lot of producers at Levinsons and Hallmark had different ideas and opinions and even Luke Goss himself, when I got there with him, he had a lot of ideas about how it should be. So it wound up being an amalgam of what we originally designed and what everybody else wanted. Ultimately everyone was happy - so I’m happy. But it wound up being a little more of a romanticised, subdued version. I wanted to go a little more monstrous with it - but that wasn’t the film we were making."

When you say ‘monstrous’...
"Well, he doesn’t really look like a dead guy. There’s not a lot of that discolouration that I originally wanted to do. We did a test where we did a lot more stuff like that and it was ultimately vetoed. It just wasn’t what they were looking for. And Luke also didn’t feel like he wanted it for his performance. He wanted a more subdued look for the guy, he wanted him to look a lot more human - ‘almost human’ you might say. So that’s what we wanted to do. He had some pretty nasty stitched-up scars on his neck but other than that, at first glance he doesn’t really look like a corpse, like a lot of the other interpretations."

What he does look like is how the character is described in the novel, which hasn’t been done before.
"Which I think was probably our take and that was the reason I conceded. We absolutely went back to the novel. Kevin Bocarde literally e-mailed me right from the novel the description of the creature when we were designing it. How she talks about the jaundicy skin stretched over bone - and that’s what we did. He basically has this creepy, really thin, pulled skin over his musculature and bone structure to really bring that out. We talked about him looking kind of skeletal with the dark sockets and the really big cheek bones and that type of thing. So yes, we did go back to the novel and try to forget all the Jack Pierce ones and all the other good ones and bad ones: forget them and do our own spin. Luke was helpful in that too. He had been reading the book a lot and was really in that mindset. So it was good to tune everything else out and do our own thing, for whatever that’s worth."

Luke’s body shape must help. As a former drummer, he’s thin and tall but very muscular.
"When we were first talking about doing this they were talking about getting a massive guy like Michael Clarke Duncan to play this guy. They actually tossed his name around which was a little frightening. So I expected a really huge guy, so when they decided on Luke it definitely was surprising. As far as stature, he’s not super-tall but he does have good musculature and a great, great face."

Probably the best ever visual interpretation was the Bernie Wrightson illustrations. Did those influence you at all?
"We tried literally just to go back to the book and not to look at any of that stuff. Sure, we looked at it when we were building: yeah, that’s really cool. But it wasn’t what we were doing. We doing something a little more like that; I think if it had been up to Almost Human it probably would have looked a little more like that, but since there were so many other powers that be in the mix, we did what everybody wanted collectively. We wound up not looking at anything, just drawing the look from what everyone thought it should be. Kevin Connor as well."

When I went out there it was extremely hot and there’s no cooling system in that suit. Was there nothing you could do?
"Um... no. An ice cube on the back of the neck every once in a while. Unfortunately that’s just par for the course in taking a job like that. Luckily he’s been in prosthetics a lot. I don’t know if he’s worn a full-body suit but he’s been in prosthetics quite a bit. He knew what he was getting in for and he’s in good shape. We kept him as cool as we could. We’ve put guys though a lot more torture than that on Angel week after week after week - so it wasn’t that big a deal. Since we did make everything out of silicone, even the body suit was out of silicone, it was much more like a closed, neoprene structure. It wasn’t like a foam suit, it didn't have any room to really breathe. Silicone is a lot more closed off, so it was probably slightly hotter than a foam suit. Gabe De Cunto did a great job because he stayed there six weeks in the sun and had to do that make-up. He did a tremendous job after I left."

You’re a big fan of silicone vs foam, right back to Club Vampire, when it was unfashionable but now more people are using it.
"Absolutely. When I was doing it there were a few other people pioneering it. I wasn’t a pioneer by any stretch of the imagination. But I have been a big fan of it for many, many years. I just think that, until there’s something else, it’s the closest that we have to flesh. It’s not right for everything. I think I started using it on Buffy and Angel; no-one else up to that point had used it on those shows, and it certainly works for certain make-ups here and there. But with just the sheer volume of demons that we have to do on that show, it wouldn’t make sense to put a stunt guy in big silicone make-up for ten hours of fighting. So it doesn’t work for everything, but for things that are supposed to be really organic and fleshy, there’s nothing better. So I’m definitely a fan of it and we’re constantly trying to work with it and discover new ways to make it better."

Is it cheaper than latex?
"It’s actually more expensive. It’s about five times the price."

Can you give some idea how much each suit that you make costs?
"The suits we make reusable, but the facial prosthetics are not reusable. It’s tens of thousands to produce something like that. Just the silicone alone is thousands and thousands of dollars. That’s not counting all the special equipment that you need to inject it into the mould, or the labour. That’s just materials."

Do you make it in particular colours or is it painted afterwards?
"The thing with silicone is you try to intrinsically colour it. You try to colour it in layers as you put it into the mould, and you tint it as well. The thing is to try to preserve as much of the translucency as you can and then control the opacity in the painting. That’s my philosophy anyway. You get a good skin tone and keep it really translucent. That’s one of the reasons I really like silicone; you need very little painting on the outside. I could put those pieces on Luke’s face and I could see the skin, the red blotchiness, underneath. So the camera can see it too.

"If you’re careful to preserve a lot of his own contrast and a lot of his own skin tone and ruddiness under that, you don’t have to overpaint it. I think that’s why sometimes when people jump into silicone, or any translucent material, gelatine or any of that, they have a tendency to overpaint it. When you start with foam latex, it comes out solid white - it looks like your garage door, solid white and opaque. You have to then paint that in different layers with flesh colours to imply that it’s translucent although it never really looks translucent. A really, really, really good artist can do that. Dick Smith certainly did it on Amadeus - that’s a great make-up which looks like skin, because it’s done with the right lighting as well. That’s the other thing, that can make or break something like that. So yes, you try to preserve the translucency and minimise the painting."

Were you also responsible for the body parts?
"We did the body parts and we did the Bride. The Bride’s great, probably the best thing we did."

When you’re developing these things, do you go through a lot of prototypes before you end up with the one you want?
"Yes. It’s the same thing as directing. I just directed a movie over the summer and I can relate that to that. It’s the same sort of thing where you expect something and then it’s completely different. But sometimes there’s still that heart there. You’re like: ‘Okay, I see it but it’s completely different to the way I saw it in my head.’ It’s the same thing but on a smaller scale, doing make-up or a creature. You have great ideas, you see it in your head, you go through the design process, you go back and forth to people about certain aesthetics - and ultimately it winds up the same thing but not the same thing. So it’s a fun sort of birthing process. I actually welcome it, I like it."

How did you land the job on the Marc Hershon-scripted Monster Makers?
"Kevin Bocarde, who’s one of the producers over there, I’d been friends with him since the Corman days. He and I stay in contact and work together a lot. I’ve worked with him on a multitude of projects, but that’s the first project that he’s done over there that he was able to bring me into the fold. Normally they do all these cuddly movies that don’t need decapitations and body parts and monsters. This was the first thing that we could actually work together on so Kyle, Clake and him brought me in on Monster Makers."

With it being a family film, how do you go about making horror effects that are suitably scary but won’t upset kids?
"That’s sort of subjective because the weirdest things scared me when I was a kid. Just random stuff would scare me, stuff that wasn’t even intentionally scary. But I loved movies like Monster Squad when I was a kid so I think everyone in my shop pretty much knew where we were heading. It was: make it like a wolf-guy but a little cartoon-y. It’s pretty easy, you just restrain yourself a little bit, don’t go too realistic. Even when we were painting the dentures for the teeth, you don’t put too much stain on them to make them look really real. You just hold back about twenty percent."

There’s a rat-guy and Mannikin.
"Mannikin was kind of creepy. I think we went over the line with that! I think it might scare some kids. Mannikin will probably scare the piss out of them!"

You worked with Roger Corman on 22 movies. Everybody I’ve ever interviewed has worked with Roger Corman. It’s like you have to do it to get a union card.
"If you work too much with Roger Corman they withhold your union card!"

You must have been in tune with Roger Corman to work with him that much?
"I was. It came at a very formative time in my life and it was something that I will always hold near and dear to me. In many ways, working for New Concorde and Roger Corman started my company. I started Almost Human when I was doing films for him. It just came at a really good time. I was in my early twenties and I had worked at Stan Winston. I had done all these big movies but realised that I really wanted to do my own thing. I knew how to do things quality and I knew how to do things on my own. I had done a lot of music videos and stuff, so I knew how to do quality work very cheap and on a budget and on time. So when I started working for Corman it was like: wow, what we normally pay guys to do a really bad job, this guy can do a good job!

"I was working out of my garage for the first few films and just having a really good time. It was training; I learned a lot, about blocking and just everything to do with the set I learned there. I did my first minor little bit of directing over there. It’s a great, great, great place because everyone who works over there is working for the right reasons. No-one thinks they’re making art, no-one thinks they’re going to be huge stars right after that. No-one’s definitely doing it for the money! So everyone’s there with the right mentality of, ‘Hey, let’s do this and let’s move on.’ I wound up staying there because frankly it was a great gig. I got to do whatever I wanted.

"It was completely unlike what I do now with Angel or with Buffy in the last couple of seasons. There’s a huge, huge approval process; a horn sticking out of a guy’s head has to be run by nine people. Roger Corman was completely the opposite of that: ‘I need an alien for this.’ ‘Do you want to see what it looks like?’ ‘No, I feel confident you’ll make a good one.’ You bring it in, they love it, and you move on. So it was great, it was wonderful, I could flex my creative muscles and do a bit of what I wanted to do. I did that and did his TV show that went to Sci-Fi. Met a lot of great people over the years over there, and a lot of those people went off to do other great things and called me in on them. So it was a great experience."

One Corman film I have to ask you about. I saw it on TV recently and I couldn’t believe that anything as cheap-looking as that -
"Starquest II?"

It was called Mind Breakers, but yes. that’s the one.
"Oh God. Starquest II was the very first Corman movie that I did."

It really looked like it had been made for about a thousand dollars.
"I know, it’s true. That was where I was going with the aliens: ‘We have five bucks, we want you to make some alien masks.’ ‘Well, what do you mean by masks?’ ‘Well, you know, the guys have to be aliens.’ ‘Don’t you want prosthetics?’ ‘No, it takes too long and it’s too expensive. Just make a mask.’ Then you get there and: ‘Why isn’t the alien talking? It’s got to talk. Can you hook fishing line to the mouth to make it talk?’ No! That looks bad! You get there and it looks bad, but you live and you learn. So that was an interesting experience. But what’s funny about that is it was the first thing I did over there and I think I got about $10,000 to do the whole movie which was completely ridiculous. But I actually got to work with Robert Englund on that which is one of the highlights to this day of my career."

Do you actually get to see the script, assuming there even was a script?
"Believe it or not, there was one! I do get to read the script, but back in those days I didn’t care what it was, to be honest with you. ‘Are there monsters in it? Okay, great. Do I get paid something at least so I can eat? Okay, wonderful. Let’s go.’ It's just the way it was: good script, bad script, it really didn’t make a difference to me back then."

What’s the film you’ve just directed?
"It’s called Lightning Bug. It’s about a young kid who wants to make monsters in Alabama."

That’s you.
"You jump to that! I didn’t say that. But it's cool. I’ve got a really wonderful cast. It’s a story I wrote about four years ago, and we’ll be hitting the festivals with it. I’m really excited about it. It’s a really fine film."

Did you do the make-ups too?
"My company did. I was a little too busy to actually do the make-ups but my company did, yes. There’s not a whole lot of stuff in it, believe it or not. Most people expected me to do this big monster movie but really my film is a lot more psychological and the monsters in the film are human. Which is sort of what it’s about; it’s drawing that line between fantasy and human elements, how human monsters are so much more horrifying than the fantasy ones. We’ve just completed the film. It’s done and we’re going to be getting it out there in the next couple of weeks."

Had you directed at all before that?
"Actually Kevin Bocarde and I co-directed a documentary for Roger Corman on the making of the TV show, Black Scorpion. So we did that and I got to direct Adam West who was our host. I’ve directed second unit for Roger on a few movies, but for a feature, this is my directing debut. You can check out the website at lightningbugmovie.com. Laura Prepon from That Seventies Show is my star."

What’s next?
"We’re doing two movies. For Silver Nitrate we’re doing a movie called Dead Birds. We’re getting back to our roots, doing two horror films for this company. Alex Turner is this guy who’s directing a thing called Dead Birds. It’s really cool, very Lynch-ian, it has Henry Thomas in it. We’re shooting that down in Mobile, Alabama and building lots of very cool stuff for that. It’s fun, it’s probably the coolest movie we’ve ever done. Hot on the heels of that we’re doing a film for the same production company called The Bayou about these killer fish. Killer fish - can’t escape that Roger Corman vibe! That’s being directed by the guy who directed Spawn, Marc AZ Dippé."[This became Frankenfish! - MJS]

Do you have a pet project that you’d like to do one day?
"Yes, but it was already made. It was called Freddy Vs Jason. That was my dream job and I’m a little sore about that. That was an unfortunate victim of runaway production. Had it been shot in LA I probably would have killed someone to be able to do it, but what are you going to do? I really wanted to do that because I was a huge, huge Freddy fan when I was a kid. I always wanted to do a Freddy movie. So my dream job has already slipped through my fingers."

Maybe there’ll be a re-match.
"That’s what I’m hearing. You never know. As long as they don’t shoot in Canada. Maybe we’ll get some jobs like we used to back in the ‘80s."

website: www.almosthuman.net

I was very excited to meet director Kevin Connor in August 2003 when I went out to Slovakia to the set of the Hallmark production of Frankenstein. Part of this was used in the resulting Fangoria feature.

How did you get this directing job on Frankenstein?
"I’ve been working for Hallmark for many years now, another division of theirs - Larry Levinson Productions and Robert Halmi Jr. I had a call from Nick Lombardo, their production supervisor: would I be interested in doing Frankenstein as a mini-series? He said they were going to follow the book very closely, so I said as long as it’s not a horror film per se, I’d be very interested in doing it. I read the script, it was a very good script, pretty close to the book - as close as you can get - but it was more human. The challenge was going to be the creature, being sympathetic to the creature after all the horendous things he does of course. So it had more characterisation which was more interesting than just trying to do a straight, scary horror film."

Are you playing down the horror and playing up the romance and the adventure?
"Yes, the gothic tragedy. And the romance side of it, but at the end of the day it’s a gothic tragedy."

How many other Frankenstein movies have you seen? Are you familiar with what’s been done in the past?
"I made a point to see the De Niro/Branagh one which was ... interesting. But I found it so distracting that I didn’t feel a lot of sympathy with anybody particularly. It was just so frenetic, the steadicam just drove me giddy - but that’s a choice. The Karloff film I saw many, many years ago. I didn’t see the David Wickes one with Patrick Bergin. I’ve seen some of the Hammer ones. But the best one is Young Frankenstein, that’s my favourite, though it’s tongue-in-cheek. But the actual book itself has not been done that often. Everybody think that every Frankenstein film is about the book but really they’re all spin-offs. I didn’t see Ken Russell’s Gothic, but that was about how it came about. Andy Warhol did one too. But I hadn’t really read the book before and it was just the history of it, how it came to be written, that’s just fascinating to me. I was very excited about being able to have a go at doing the book properly."

So preparing for this was the first time you actually read the book?
"Yes, I have to be honest."

How did it meet your expectations?
"It was a great surprise. You just think it’s a horror story but when you realise how beautifully it’s written, and how far ahead of the time she was, and what she was saying, it was quite an eye-opener for me, and really triggered off a lot of thoughts and senses, I must say."

It’s a daunting prospect to turn that into something accessible for modern audiences. Apart from the age, you’ve got the concentric structure of the narrative. How has this been turned into something that TV audiences will appreciate?
"American audiences don’t really like gloomy films, and whichever way you look at it, at the end of the day this is a bit gloomy! It’s a very dark piece. But it’s a good tale, and I hope that will come through, and you will be sympathetic with the creature and, up to a point, Victor - what he has created, what he’s done. But the script’s structured very well, it’s almost a mini-series. It keeps moving backwards and forwards, intercutting the story, which has always been a problem before. In the book it’s just great big chunks - you stay with Victor for a long time then you stay with the creature for a long time - but Mark Kruger the writer has very cleverly woven it backwards and forwards. So I think the structure of this works very well indeed. The dialogue is good. He has picked the right pieces, the right parts."

Did you have any say in casting?
"Yes and no. Usually in television the main leads are picked by the network, the channel or the producers. So Luke Goss and Alec Newman were chosen, but I spoke to them. William Hurt - it obviously was a great honour to be working with someone like that, and also Donald Sutherland and Julie Delpie. We haven’t got our blind man yet. The supporting cast are just excellent. So a lot of the lesser parts I did cast, and all the locals from Bratislava I cast. They’re really good, great faces."

How are you finding shooting in Slovakia?
"It’s delightful. I’ve shot in Morocco and in Budapest so I enjoy shooting in these places. These are absolutely wonderful people, very enthusiastic and dedicated. I’m enjoying it."

How does it compare with the fantasy films that you’re best known for, the Doug McClures?
"Well, there’s more money obviously, and you’ve got a longer time to tell the story. This isn’t as superficial, shall we say, as the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories. They’re pure adventure and hokum, they are what they are, slightly tongue-in-cheek. But I can treat this seriously. There’s no tongue-in-cheek with this, it’s a very strong piece with a lot of character in it. There wasn’t a lot of charcter in those other pieces. They were good fun in their day and it was wonderful to be given the opportunity to do them and to learn a lot of the craft of this genre."

You’ve had a busy and long career but it’s quite a while since you directed a fantasy picture.
"Yes, I suppose Motel Hell was the last horror film I did. they just haven’t come my way, but that’s showbiz. Although I’ve tried to develop some of my own stuff, it’s very difficult to get your own things going. Nobody wants to do the things that you want to do. So a lot of the time, the subjects that come along, as long as they appeal and the subjects are good then I’ll do them. but I haven’t had any offers for horror films for quite a while. I’ve done some Dickens adaptations, which are period but not horror films. I thoroughly enjoy those sort of pieces. I’ve got a couple of Victor Hugos that I’d like to do that are relatively unknown, but they won’t do them unless the public will recognise the title, so it has to be the Hunchback or Les Miserables or something like that. It’s very difficult to get any other Victor Hugo, an unknown piece, done. but we keep trying."

What about the special effects here?
"There’s a lot of CGI in this Arctic sequence. We’ve got a wonderful storyboard artist from Paris and we went through all the Arctic stuff basically. There’s a lot to do here in the CGI world, but otherwise it’s pretty straightforward."

They key to any Frankenstein film is the creature. How involved were you with the design?
"The design had been done by a company in LA for the producers and they’d come a long way with designs and sketches when I was brought in. They were well on the right track. I think I asked them to have fewer scars. There were more stitches and stuff in the face which I think would have been a mistake to have too much of.

"Because in the Shelley book she doesn’t describe all that stitching of the face and sewing and stuff. So I thought let’s play that down because that becomes a pure horror film and you’d understand why little children would be frightened of this thing coming into the village. So let’s have just subtle scars. He’s a cadaver that’s been brought to life so the face is translucent and you can see the veins in his face, the blood pumping through. It shows there’s a human being there, not just lots of ugly scars. So we arrived at a face that, although disfigured, there’s sympathy there basically."

Director: Richard Mansfield
Writer: Richard Mansfield
Producer: Richard Mansfield
Country: UK
Year of release: 2013
Reviewed from: online
Website: http://muckypuppets.blogspot.co.uk

Many people still think that the first ever feature-length animated film was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, but tonto toon fans know that it was actually Lotte Reiniger’s shadow animation The Adventures of Prince Achmed, made in Germany in 1926. (Wikipedia reckons there were two earlier films made in Argentina, now lost.) Richard Mansfield’s extraordinary and poetic Wolfskin owes an obvious debt to Reiniger’s work and indeed is dedicated to her memory.

Whereas Prince Achmed was animated frame by frame, Mansfield’s technique - which he has developed across a number of short films - is more like traditional southeast Asian shadow puppetry with his figures animated in real time using wires. Just occasionally a real 3D object is used when necessary, such as a hand or a bottle. Modern video capabilities enhance this antique technique, providing Mansfield with a depth of field which Reiniger never had.

Wolfskin runs a full 71 minutes and is an amalgam of classical European fairy tales. Thus there are specific references to Sleeping Beauty (pricking the finger, city falls asleep), Cinderella (glass slipper, and chopping up feet to fit into it) and Rapunzel (really, really long hair). Plus there are mermaids, clockwork servants and, of course, wolves. While there are human-wolf interactions and relationships, including a human phoetus and a lupine phoetus developing in the womb as twins, there are no actual, tradition, common or garden werewolves. Nevertheless, anyone compiling a list of British werewolf pictures which didn’t include Wolfskin would be selling themselves short. There is certainly enough grim death and Grimm violence here to peg this on the fringes of the British Horror Revival.

Having said all of the above, I would be lying if I said that I could actually follow precisely what was going on. Not that I think it matters. This is a film that’s more about imagery than plot. It’s presented silent, as was Prince Achmed (albeit that was more forced on Reiniger by virtue of sound films not having yet been invented) with a pleasing, mellifluous score composed and performed by Anglo-Turkish singer/harpist/therimin-player Ozlem Simsek. Mansfield’s earlier shorts are mostly either music videos or narrated ghost stories, thus he is used to working without dialogue. The latter include versions of Amelia B Edwards 1864 tale ‘The Phantom Coach’ and Francis Marion Crawford’s 1894 classic ‘The Upper Berth’, both available on the Mansfield’s Mucky Puppets blog.

It is this experience in matching imagery to sound that has led to Wolfskin where, ironically, the process has reversed with Simsek matching her music to Mansfield’s visuals. The whole film has taken three years to produce and is a quite singular achievement for all concerned. Wolfskin is a captivating, enigmatic, lyrical film - magical in a number of ways - which will repay you your 70 minutes many-fold as the imagery and visual ideas linger in your memory. The only contemporary comparison to Mansfield’s work would be Ashley Thorpe’s quasi-animated films: the intention is similar, though the techniques are different.

Mansfield is now expanding his creative work beyond animation and is currently in post on his first live-action feature, Who is Coming aka Owlman, partially inspired MR James’ classic story ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad’ (you may recall that written on the whistle in that story is ‘Quis est iste qui uenit’ which the narrator translates as ‘Who is this who is coming?’). A second live action feature, The Secret Path, is also in production.

Wolfskin is a unique film, one of those oddities of the BHR which make the entire subgenre so fascinating and diverse. I really, really enjoyed The Phantom Coach and The Upper Berth too. Perhaps Mansfield’s next animated feature could be an anthology of classic Victorian ghost tales. In the meantime, take a look at Wolfskin. Lotte Reiniger would be proud.

MJS rating: A-

Director: Robbie Moffat
Writer: Robbie Moffat
Producer: Simon Harris
Cast: Marnie Baxter, Suzanne Kendall, Sunita Shroff
Country: UK
Year of release: 2010
Reviewed from: online
Website: www.palmtreefilm.com

Who is Robbie Moffat? He is a film-maker - director/writer/producer - and he makes a lot of films. The IMDB lists 18 completed feature films as director since 2000. There are 26 films listed on his Palm Tree Films website. And yet I’m willing to bet you haven’t heard of a single one. Because I certainly haven’t.

Let me put that in context. Most of the films I review are movies that most people have never heard of. That’s not surprising. Most people, it is very clear, even if they say they like watching films, actually have no concept of anything outside of mainstream UK/US cinema produced after they were born. My point is that even those of us who love cult films, indie films, obscure films, even we have never heard of, let alone seen, anything made by Robbie Moffat. Yet the man is a factory.

And on the evidence of Beast in the Basement (aka Conquering Heroes), these are real films. These are not the amateur camcorder larks of Paul TT Easter nor are they the over-wrought self-indulgencies of Philip Gardiner. Moffat actually knows how to make a film, with decent production values, good (if non-name) actors, more-than-competent photography, editing and sound. Beast was produced at Pinewood, from where Moffat has recently relocated his operation to Wimbledon Studios. It is a perfectly good DTV-quality B-movie and therefore actually considerably better than than most of its rivals.

So why do Moffat’s films only seem to be available through his own online channels or via self-released DVDs? Why are they never reviewed anywhere? How has he managed to bang out a couple of feature films every year since the turn of the millennium without anyone outside of his own casts and crews knowing who he is? It’s all very odd.

There is a biography of Moffat himself on his website. His background is in publishing (Palm Tree Books, est. 1980) , festival management (Newcastle Fringe, Swansea Fringe) and theatre. He clearly has fingers in many pies and has done lots and lots of work in many media. And still no-one has heard of the guy, and his extensive filmography looks at first glance like some epic vanity project. I don’t think it is, but I also don’t know what it is if it’s not that.

He has made romantic dramas (Love the One You’re With), gangster thrillers (The Hawk and the Dove), historical epics (Winter Warrior), crime capers (Rain Dogs), biopics (Red Rose), romcoms (Photoshoot) and even space operas (Dark Side of Heaven). His horror films are Cycle (‘Five students stalked by a cannibal’), Seven Crosses (‘They didn’t set out to be murderers!’), Sisters Grimm (witches and wolves in Georgian England) and this one.

Marnie Baxter (a Shetlander who was a private detective in a couple of episodes of EastEnders) and Suzanne Kendall (who once acted in a spookshow event onboard HMS Belfast!) are Lily and Iris, sisters living in a large house near an army base, inherited from their officer father. They are popular girls with the local squaddies, who often pop over for a drink and a dance. One particular soldier, Mitch (Jon-Paul Gates, who was in The Asylum’s Welsh-shot Dragon, dull BHR entry Messages, a couple of Steven M Smith features and even Charles Band’s Decadent Evil II!) has a real crush on Iris, bordering on obsession. Danger arrives in the form of a series of deaths which are blamed on an escaped big cat but which seem to follow a pattern, all targeting soldiers and all within the vicinity of the girls’ manor house.

We learn fairly early on, to no great surprise, that there is someone locked up in the girls’ cellar, and our natural assumption is that he is periodically escaping and transforming into a werewolf. Or were-cat. Or something. We’re going to be half-right.

Beast in the Basement turns out to be more psychological horror than supernatural but that’s not to its detriment. The secrets kept hidden by Lily and Iris are dark and deep and masked by their outward veneer of normality. In their mutual dependence, they reminded me of the sisters in Don’t Ring the Doorbell but with less clearly defined, hence more ambiguous and more interesting, comparative degrees of oddness. Iris is the older, more domineering one, more flirtatious with the soldiers (which may be her downfall) and with a more hard-nosed view of their father. Her younger sibling Lily, though she at first seems the follower to Iris’ leader, is actually more level-headed and calmer, yet she has effectively blocked out the bad memories of what Daddy was really like.

As the killings continue, and Scottish-Indian Detective Arun (TV presenter Sunita Shroff, giving a frankly cracking performance) snoops around, the sisters realise that their prisoner has indeed found a means of escape. The question then becomes: how can they prevent further deaths without revealing their own transgressions? Woven into this are Mitch’s drunken reaction to Iris’ rejection of his proposal and a series of relationships within and around the army personnel. I’m not saying it all works, but enough works to make this a watchable film. Powered by Baxter’s and Kendall’s finely detailed performances of two fascinating lead characters and their unusual relationship - inseparable from their situation and family history - Beast in the Basement’s strengths outweigh its weaknesses. The acting is all good (most of the cast are regulars in Moffat’s own rep company) and the photography, editing and sound are all crisp and professional.

Yes, the low budget shows occasionally. For example, the soldiers only seem to possess dress uniforms which they wear at all times, even on a training run. And the one time we somebody shot at point blank range, it’s all rather clean and there’s none of the blood and brains everywhere which would happen in reality. On a script level, the precise relationship between the sisters and the squaddies isn’t clear, and their penchant for line dancing is a bit odd, with the soldiers donning extremely gay sequinned stetsons to join in.

But the dialogue is well-crafted and realistic, and there is some nice characterisation in the supporting cast, especially Lisa-Marie Long (Temptation, The Hike and Mara Jade in a Star Wars fanfilm) as female squaddie Jas and Louise Hawthorne as Arun’s patient colleague Charlie. Also in the cast are Bruce Lawrence (Bare Naked Talent, Stag Night of the Dead, The Watcher Self and a Doctor Who Christmas Special), Howard Corlett (Man Who Sold the World, The Demon Within), Michael Elkin (writer/director/star of Irish short Banshee), Michele de Broel (also in Banshee) and Jason Harvey (recently in a half-hour short called She-Wolf of the Woods).

Now, the more alert among you may be saying - indeed, may have been saying for several paragraphs now - hang about, that sounds like a remake of dodgy 1970s Brit-flick Beast in the Cellar. And indeed it is. The sisters in that Tigon production were considerably older, played by Flora Robson and Beryl Reid as mad old spinsters in contrast to the striking Ms Baxter and the extremely cute Ms Kendall, but the basic plot was identical, down to the eventual resolution. The marketing material distributed by Moffat when Beast in the Basement screened at the Cannes Film Market in 2011 admitted that Basement was a remake of Cellar but on screen there is no acknowledgment that Moffat's script for Basement is based on the original screenplay for Cellar by writer/director James Kelley. Which seems a tad unfair.

Here's the thing. Beast in the Cellar (aka Young Man, Are You Dying?, originally released as a double bill with Blood on Satan's Claw) was produced by Graham Harris... who was the father of Simon Harris... who was the producer of Beast in the Basement. It's a sort of 'Dad, can I borrow the movie premise?' affair. An editor by trade, Harris fils also cut this film and produced two further Robbie Moffat joints, comedy Nudes in Tartan and historical drama Crab Island. If his IMDB page is accurate, then he has amassed a range of interesting credits over the years include visual effects editor on Cyborg Cop and The Muppet Christmas Carol, sound editing work on Event Horizon and Superman IV, and assistant editorial duties on Aliens, Batman, Bridget Jones’ Diary and many others. Now he’s producing Robbie Moffat features. Hey, it’s a gig.

Elsewhere in the credits, this was the first feature score for hard-to-spell composer Ram Khatabakhsh whose subsequent work includes Dominic Burns’ Cut and Will Moore’s missing-in-action Blood Army/The Nephilim. Moffat’s regular DP Bob Ramsay handled the camera while costume designer June Hudson has the coolest CV of anyone in the list, having spent the late 1970s working on Blake’s 7, Survivors, Doctor Who and The Basil Brush Show.

Beast in the Basement is one of those films that ably demonstrates the vast numbers of professional features being made in the UK nowadays, far, far outside the view of any sort of mainstream press or media. Frankly, quite a long way from the view of even farty ex-journos and their cult movie websites. But at a couple of quid a pop, it’s worth those with an interest in the BHR checking out this and other Robbie Moffat titles. This is never going to set the world on fire, but you and I have both seen far, far worse films than this one, often made with ten times the budget.

Finally, for completists, it should be noted that this isn’t a werewolf film. It therefore joins Kevin McDonagh’s Lycanthropy in the short list of British horror films which seem to be about werewolves but aren’t. And while this does at least offer an explanation near the end of why the attacks seemed to be carried out by a wild animal (which is more than Lycanthropy managed), it’s a pretty half-hearted and pathetic explanation which doesn’t really stand up to even the most cursory examination.

MJS rating: B